' ^^^'^TTftl^B 



jF^V 



<tl.»WI v-> Ji'„t*«S'W!i 



I 



'W'^4'^ 



■Kjf ikJ k Kji ^ 



T 



t^ff-'XtfW*- 





M 


LiLSill'l 1 













Rno]c >/4 y^ ly iT 



i Q 4 Ij 



Ci)BfRIGHT DEPOSm 



■I ' -!" -j w awj^ 



o 




& 



i 






F 



Im 



General Editor 

LINDSAY TODD DAMON, A. B. 

Professor of English in Brown University 



ADDISON — Sir Roger de Coverley Papers — Abbott 

ADDISON AND STEELE— 5f/er«ores from The Taller and The Spec- 
tator — Abbott 

^NEID OF VIRGIL— Allxnson 

AUSTEN— Prfde and Prejudice 

BROWNING — Selected Poems — Reynolds 

BUILDERS OF DEMOCRACY — GfiEENLAW 

BUNYAN — The Pilgrim's Progress — Latham 

BURKE — Speech on, Conciliation with Collateral Readings — Ward. 

BURNS — Selected Poems an J C ARLYLE — jassay on Burns — Marsh 

CHAUCER — Selections — Greenla'W 

COLERIDGE — TJie Ancient Mariner 

LOWELL— yiszore of Sir Launfal ] ^ vol.— Moody 

COOPER — The Last of the Mohicans — Lewis 

COOPER — The Spy — Damon 

DANA — Two Years Before the Mast — Westcptt 

DEFOE — Robinson Crusoe — Hastings 

Democracy Today — Gauss 

DE QUINCEY — Joan of Arc and Selections — Moody 

DE QUINCEY — The Flight of a Tartar Tribe — French. 

DICKENS — A Christmas Carol, etc. — Broadus 

DICKENS — A Tale of Two Cities — Baldwin 

DICKENS — David C opperfi eld— Baj.i>-win 

DRYDEN — Palamon and Arcite — Cook 

EMERSON — Essays and Addresses — Heydrick 

English Poems — From Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Byron, 

Macaulay, ARNOLD, and others — Scudder 
English Popular Ballads — Hart 
Essays — English and American — Alden 
Familiar Letters — Greenlaw 
FRANKLIN — Autobiography— GniFFin 
French Short Stories — Schweikert 
GASKELL (Mrs.) — Cranford — Hancock 
GEORGE ELIOT — Silas Marner — Hancock 
GEORGE ELIOT — The Mill on the Floss — Ward 
GOLDSMITH — The Vicar of Wakefield— Mohton 
HAWTHORNE — The House of the Seven Gables — Herrick 
HAWTHORNE — Twice-Told Tales — Herrick and Brueke 
HUGHES- — Tom Brown's School Days — de Mille 
IRVING — Life of Goldsmith — Krapp 
IRVING — The Sketch Book — Krapp 
IRVING — Tales oj a Traveller — and parts of Tfte Sketch Book — Krapp 



Wl}2 Hake lEttgltsll (SlluBBXtB-tonntmth 

<».: : : . * 

LAMB — Essays of Elia — Benedict 

LONCi.FELLOW — Narrative Poems — Powell 

LOWELL — Vision, of Sir Launfal — See Coleridge 

MACAULAY — Essays on Addison and Johnson — Newcomer 

MACALTLAY — Essays on Clive and Hastings — Newcomer . 

MACAUJvAY — Goldsmith, Frederic the Great, Madame D'Arblay — New- 
comer 

MACAULAY — Essays on Milton and Addison — Newcomer 

MILTON — L' Allegro, II Penseroso, Comns, and Lycidc^ — Neilson 

MILTON — Paradise Lost, Books I and II — Farley 

Old Testament Narratives — Rhodes , 

One Hundred Narrative Poems — Teter 

PALGRAVE — Golden Treasury — Newcomer- 

PARKMAN — The Oregon Trail — Macdonald 

POE — Poems and Tales, Selected — Newcomer 

POPE — Homer's Iliad, Books I, VI, XXII, XXIV — Cresst and Moody 

READE — The Cloister and The Hearth — de Mille 

RUSKIN — Sesame and Lilies — Linn 

Russian Sbort Stories — Schweikert 

SCOTT — Ivanhoe — Simonds 

SCOTT — Quentin Durward — SiMONDS 

SCOTT — Lady of the Lake — Moody 

SCOTT — Lay of the Last Minstrel — Moody and Willard 

SCOTT — Marmion — Moody and Willard 

SHAKSPERE — The Neilson Edition — Edited by W. A. Neilson, 

As You Like It Macbeth 

Hamlet Midsummer-Night's Dream 

Henry V Romeo and Juliet 

Julius Caesar The Tempest 

Twelfth Night 

SHAKSPERE — Merchant of Venice — Lovett, 

SOUTHEY — Life of Nelson — Westcott 

STEVENSON — Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey — Leonard 

STEVENSON — Xidnapped— Leonard 

STEVENSON — Treasure Island — Broadus 

TENNYSON — Selected Poems — Reynolds 

TENNYSON — The Princess — Copeland 

THOREAU — Walden — Bowman 

THACKERAY — Henry Esmond — Phelps 

THACKERAY — English Humorists — Ctjnliffe and Watt 

Three American Poems — The Raven, Snow-Bound, Miles Standish— 
Greever 

Types of the Short Story — Heydrick 

Washington, Webster, Lincoln — Denney 

SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 

CHICAGO : 623 S. Wabash Ave. NEW YORK : 8 East 34th Street 



}J 4jJ.^i-a^yy^ S-Xa^CX^, 



Cfte %akt CnglisiJ) Classics 



REVISED EDITION WITH HELPS TO STUDY 

SHAKSPERE'S 

ROMEO AND JULIET 



EDITED FOR SCHOOL USE 
BY 

WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON 

PRESIDENT SMITH COLLEGE 



SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 
CHICAGO NEW YORK 



..> ''-- \ 



V- 



Copyright 1914, 1920 
By Scott, Foresman and Company 



APR -6 1920 



KOCERT O. LAW COMPANY 

EDITION BOOK MANUFACTURERS 

CHICAGO, U. G. A. 



©CU565477 



^ 



PREFACE 



As in the previous volumes of this series, the 
aim of the editor has been to present a sound 
text of the play, modernized in spelling and 
punctuation, and to furnish in the introduction 
and notes comment . enough to render it thor- 
oughly intelligible. The first section of the 
introduction is intended to give the student an 
idea of the place of Romeo and Juliet in the 
history of the English drama in general and of 
Shakspere's development in particular. The 
second section deals with the date and sources 
of the play, and discusses Shakspere's language 
and versification. 

The treatment of other versions of the story 
has been confined to the tales and poems that 
may be regarded as forming the genealogy of 
.the tragedy. The tale itself is so widespread 
that an account of all the forms in which it is 
known to have appeared would require a volume 
to itself. 

The warmth and' ■^ener(>i^S; sympathy with 
which Shakspere has rendered the passion of 
the young lovers make the task of enlisting the 
student's interest in this tragedy an easy one. 
Nowhere else has he presented with such bril- 
liance and intensity the intoxication of first love ; 

11 



12 PEEFACE 

and the lyrical passages in which this finds its 
loftiest expression are such as to make the 
first claim of the play for attention lie in its 
sheer poetry. Even if its dramatic qualities had 
been negligible, Romeo and Juliet would have 
held a high place among English poems. 

But its dramatic qualities are not negligible. 
The action of the play not only serves to bring 
out a group of clearly delineated characters, but 
it shows us the hero and heroine undergoing 
marked development. Up to the time when this 
play appeared, Shakspere had attempted noth- 
ing of this kind. The characters in the early 
comedies and histories had been led through 
varied experiences, but their natures had 
remained unchanged. But here Juliet is trans- 
formed from a young girl, delightfully frank 
and spontaneous but utterly untested and inex- 
perienced, into a woman capable of carrying out 
alone a plan that called for strength of will and 
steadfastness of purpose, and finally of refusing 
to survive all that made life worth living for 
her. Romeo, meanwhile, is purged of the 
boyish sentimental fancy he had been nursing 
for Rosaline, is taught by Juliet that true love 
demands deeds as well as words, and rises at 
the close to the full stature of a man. The 
ennobling effect of love, of which the writers of 
the Renaissance had so much to say, has seldom 
been more convincingly presented. 



KOMEO AND JULIET 13 

Further, the plot has a marked interest of 
its own. It opens with a scene expounding 
the feud which disturbs the peace of Verona. 
The turning point of the action is the deaths of 
Tybalt and Mercutio as a result of this feud. 
The concluding scene shows the recoiiciliation 
of the hostile factions. Thus the political 
story envelops the love story, and provides the 
complication which turns love into tragedy; 
while the death of the lovers is not only a 
triumph of constancy over external obstacles, 
but the means of solving the political problem. 

These three elements, then, the poetry of the 
speeches, the development of the characters, and 
the significance of the action, form the chief fea- 
tures of a plan of study of Romeo and Juliet. 

For further details on the life and work of 
Shakspere the following may be referred to : 
Dowden's Shakspere Primer, and Shakspere, 
His Mind and Art; A. C. Bradley's Shake- 
spearean Tragedy; Sir Sidney Lee's Life of 
William Shakespeare (revised edition, 1909) ; 
Boas's Shakspere and His Predecessors; and 
The Facts about Shakespeare, by Neilson and 
Thorndike. For a general account of the 
English drama of the period, see A. W. Ward's 
History of English Dramatic Literature (re- 
vised edition, 1899) ; F. E. Schelling's Eliza- 
bethan Drama; A. H. Thornd'ke's Tragedy; 
and volumes Y and VI of The Cambridge His- 



14 PEE FACE 

tory of English Literature^ all of which contain 
abundant bibliographical material. For ques- 
tions of language and grammar, see A. Schmidt 's 
Shakespeare-Lexicon ; J. Bartlett's Concordance 
to Shakespeare; Onions 's Shakespeare Glossary; 
and E. A. Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar. 
As usual, Dr. H. H. Furness's New Variorum 
edition is a valuable compendium of the re- 
sults of scholarship on the present play down 
to 1874. 

In the preparation of the present edition I 
have received valuable assistance from Mr. 
H. A¥. Herrington. ^ W. A. N. 

Harvard University, Jtlay, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface . . . . ' 11 

Introduction — 

I. Sliakspere and the English Drama .... 17 

II. Borneo and Juliet 36 

Text 49 

Notes 175 

Word Index 207 

Appendix 

Helps to Study 215 

Theme Subjects 221 

Selections for Class Reading 222 

Chronological Table 223 



INTRODUCTION 

I. SHAKSPERE AND THE ENGLISH DRAMA 

The wonderful rapidity of the development of 
the English drama in the last quarter of the 
sixteenth century stands in striking contrast to 
the slowness of its growth before that period. 
The religious drama, out of which the modern 
dramatic forms were to spring, had dragged 
through centuries with comparatively little 
change, and was still alive when, in 1576, the 
first theater was bi^ilt in London. By 1600 
Shakspere had written more than half his plays 
and stood complete master of the art which he 
brought to a pitch unsurpassed in any age. 
Much of this extraordinary later progress was 
due to contemporary causes; but there entered 
into it also certain other elements which can be 
understood only in the light of the attempts that 
had been made in the three or four preceding 
centuries. 

In England, as in Greece, the drama sprang 

from religious ceremonial. The Mass, the center 

of the public worship of the Roman 

The Drama ^ ^ x • j j j. • j. 

before church, Contained dramatic mate- 

rial in the gestures of the officiat- 
ing priests, in the narratives contained in the 

17 



18 INTEODUCTION 

Lessons, and in the responsive singing and 
chanting. Latin, the language in which the 
services were conducted, was unintelligible to 
the mass of the people, and as early as the fifth 
eentuTj the clergy had begun to use such de- 
vices as tableaux vivants of scenes like the mar- 
riage in Cana and the Adoration of the Magi, to 
make comprehensible , important events in Bible 
history. Later, the Easter services were illu- 
minated by representations of the scene at the 
sepulcher on the morning of the Resurrection, 
in which a wooden, and afterwards a stone, 
structure was used for the tomb itself, and the 
dialogue was chanted by different speakers rep- 
resenting respectively the angel, the disciples, 
and the women. From such beginnings as this 
there gradually evolved the earliest form of the 
Miracle Play. 

As the presentations became more elaborate, 
the place of performance was moved first to the 
churchyard, then to the fields, and finally to the 
streets and open spaces of the towns. "With this 
change of locality went a change in the language 
and in the actors and an extension of the field 
from which the subjects were chosen. Latin 
gave way to the vernacular, and the priests to 
laymen; and miracle plays representing the 
lives of patron saints were given by schools, 
trade gilds, and other lay institutions. A fur- 
ther development appeared when, instead of 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 19 

single plays, whole series such as the extant 
York, Chester, and Coventry cycles were given, 
dealing in chronological order with the most 
important events in Bible history from the Cre- 
ation to the Day of Judgment. 

The stage used for the miracle play as thus 
developed was a platform mounted on wheels, 
wliich was moved from space to space through 
the streets. Each trade undertook one or more 
plays, and, when possible, these were allotted 
wdth reference to the nature of the particular 
trade. Thus the play representing the visit of 
the Magi bearing gifts to the infant Christ was 
given to the goldsmiths, and the building of 
the Ark to the carpenters. The costumes were 
conventional and frequently grotesque. Judas 
always wore red hair and a red beard; Herod 
appeared as a fierce Saracen; the devil had a 
terrifying mask and a tail; and. divine person- 
ages wore gilt hair. 

Meanwhile the attitude of the church toward 
these performances had changed. Priests w^ere 
forbidden to take part in them, and as early as 
the fourteenth century we find sermons directed 
agaiiist them. The secular management had a 
more important result in the introduction of 
comic elements. Figures such as Noah's wife 
and Herod became frankly farcical, and whole 
episodes drawn from contemporary life and full 
of local color were invented, in which the orig- 



20 INTEODUCTION 

inal aim of edification was displaced by an ex- 
plicit attempt at pure entertainment. Most of 
these features were characteristic of the religious 
drama in general throughout Western Europe. 
But the local and contemporary elements nat- 
urally tended to become national; and in Eng- 
land we find in these humorous episodes the 
beginnings of native comedy. 

Long before the miracle plays had reached 
their height, the next stage in the development 
of the drama had begun. Even in very early 
performances there had app'eared, among the 
dramatis personcB drawn from the Scriptures, 
personifications of abstract qualities such as 
Righteousness, Peace, Mercy, and Truth. In 
the fifteenth century this allegorical tendency, 
which was prevalent also in the non-dramatic 
literature of the age, resulted in the rise of an- 
other kind of play, the Morality, in which the 
action had an allegorical signification, the char- 
acters were mainly personifications or highly 
universalized types, and the aim was the teach- 
ing of moral lessons or social or religious reform. 
Thus the most powerful of all the Moralities, Sir 
David Lindesay's Satire of the Three Estates, 
is a direct attack upon the corruption in the 
church just before the Reformation. 

The advance implied in the Morality consisted 
not so much in any increase in the vitality of 
the characters or in the interest of the plot (in 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 21 

both of which, indeed, there was usually a fall- 
ing oif ) , as in the fact that in it the drama had 
freed itself from the bondage of having to choose 
its subject matter from one set of sources — the 
Bible, the Apocrypha, and the Lives of the 
Saints. This freedom was shared by the Inter- 
lude, a form not always to be distinguished 
from the Morality, but one in which the tend- 
ency was to substitute for personified abstrac- 
tions actual social types such as the Priest, the 
Pardoner, or the Palmer, and the plot had no 
double meaning. A feature of both forms w^as 
the Vice, a humorous character who appeared 
under the various disguises of Hypocrisy, Fraud, 
and the like, and whose function it was -to make 
fun, chiefly at the expense of the Devil. The 
Vice is historically important as having be- 
queathed some of his characteristics to the Fool 
of the later drama. 

John Heywood, the most important writer of 
Interludes, lived well into the reign of Eliza- 
beth, and even the miracle play persisted into 
the reign of her successor in the seventeenth 
century. But long before it finally disappeared 
it had become a mere medieval survival. A new 
England had meantime come into being and new 
forces were at worl^, manifesting themselves in 
a dramatic literature infinitely beyond anything 
even suggested by the crude forms which have 
been described. 



22 INTEODUCTION 

The great European intellectual movement 
known* as the Renaissance had at last reached 
England, and it brought with it materials for 
an unparalleled advance in all the living forms 
of literature. Italy and the classics, especially, 
supplied literary models and material. Not only 
were translations from these sources abundant, 
but Italian players visited England, and per- 
formed before Queen Elizabeth. Prance and 
Spain, as well as Italy, flooded the literary 
market with collections of tales, from which, 
both in the original languages and in such 
translations as are found in Painter's Palace of 
Pleasure (published 1566-67), the dramatists 
drew materials for their plots. 

These literary conditions, however, did not 
do much beyond offering a means of expression. 
For a movement so magnificent in scale as that 
which produced the Elizabethan Drama, some- 
thing is needed besides models and material. In 
the present instance this something is to be 
found in the state of exaltation which charac- 
terized the spirit of the English people in the 
days of Queen Elizabeth. Politically, the nation 
was at last one, after the protracted divisions 
of the Reformation, and its pride was stimulated 
by its success in the fight with Spain. Intellec- 
tually, it was sharing with the rest of Europe 
the exhilaration of the Renaissance. New lines 
of action in all parts of the world, new lines of 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH BEAM A 23 

thought in all departments of scholarship and 
intellectual speculation, were opening up ; and 
the whole land was throbbing with life. 

In its very beginnings the new movement in 
England showed signs of that combination of 
native tradition and foreign influence which was 
to characterize it throughout. The first regular 
English comedy, Udall's Ralph Roister Bolster, 
was an adaptation of the underplot of the Eunu- 
clius of Terence to contemporary English life. 
After a short period of 'experiment by amateurs 
working chiefly under the influence of Seneca, 
we come upon a band of professional play- 
wrights who not only prepared the way for 
Shakspere, but in some instances produced 
works of great intrinsic worth. The mytholog- 
ical dramas of hjly with the bright repartee of 
their prose dialogue and the music of their 
occasional lyrics, the interesting experiments of 
Oreene and Peele, and the horrors of the tragedy 
of Kyd, are all full of suggestions of what was 
to come. But by far the greatest of Shak- 
spere's forerunners was Christopher Marlowe, 
who not only has the credit of fixing blank verse 
as the future poetic medium for English tragedy, 
but who in his plays from Tamhurlaine to Ed- 
ward II. contributed to the list of the permanent 
masterpieces of the English drama. 

It was in the professional society of these men 
that Shakspere found himself when he came to 



24 IXTEODUCTIOX 

London. Born in the provincial town of Strat- 

ford-on-Avon in the heart of England, he was 

baptized on April 26, 1564 (May 

shakspere's g^j^ accordlnff to oiir reckoning). 

Early I.ife. 7 & &/ 

The exact day of his birth is un- 
known. His father was John Shakspere, a fairly 
prosperous tradesman, who may be supposed 
to have followed the custom of his class in edu- 
cating his son. If this were so, William would 
be sent to the Grammar School, already able to 
read, when he was seven, and there he would be 
set to work on Latin Grammar, followed by 
reading, up to the fourth year, in Cato 's Maxims^ 
^'Esop's Fables, and parts of Ovid, Cicero, and 
the medieval poet Mantuanus. If he continued 
through the fifth and sixth years, he would read 
parts of Vergil, Horace, Terence, Plautus, and 
the Satirists. Greek was not usually taught in 
the Grammar Schools. Whether he went through 
this course or not we have no means of knowing, 
except the evidence afforded by the use of the 
classics in his works, and the famous dictum 
of his friend, Ben Jonson, that he had "small 
Latin and less Greek." Wh^t w^e are sure of is 
that he was a boy of remarkable acuteness of 
observation, who used his chances for picking 
up facts of all kinds; for only thus could he 
have accumulated the fund of information which 
he put to such a variety of uses in his writings. 
Throughout the poet's early boyhood the for- 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 25 

tunes of John Shakspere kept improving until he 
reached the position of High Bailiff or Mayor 
of Stratford. When William was about thirteen, 
however, his father began to meet with reverses, 
and these are conjectured to have led to the 
boy's being taken from school early and set to 
work. What business he was taught we do not 
know, and indeed we have little more informa- 
tion about him till the date of his marriage in 
November, 1582, to. Anne Hathaway, a woman 
from a neighboring village, who was seven years 
his senior. Concerning his occupations in the 
years immediately preceding and succeeding his 
marriage several traditions have come down, — 
of his having been apprenticed as a butcher, 
of his having taken part in pcTaching expeditions, 
and the like — but none of these is based upon 
sufficient evidence. About 1585 he left Strat- 
ford, and probably by the next year he t^ad 
found his way to London. 

How soon and in what capacity he first be- 
came attached to the theaters we are again 
unable to say, but by 1592 he had certainly been 
engaged in theatrical affairs long enough to give 
some occasion for the jealous outburst of a rival 
playwright, Robert Greene, who in a pamphlet 
posthumously published in that year, accused 
him of plagiarism. Henry Chettle, the editor of 
Greene's pamphlet, shortly after apologized for 
his connection with the charge, and bore witness 



,26 INTEODUCTION 

to Shakspere's honorable reputation as a man 
and to his skill both as an actor and a dramatist. 

Robert Greene, who thus supplies us with the 
earliest extant indications of his rival 's presence 
in London, was 'in many ways a typical figure 
among the playwrights with whom Shakspere 
worked during this early period. A member of 
both universities, Greene came to the metropolis 
while yet a young man, and there led a life of 
the most diversified literary activity, varied with 
bouts of the wildest debauchery. He was a 
writer of satirical and controversial pamphlets, 
of romantic tales, of elegiac, pastoral, and lyric 
poetry, a translator, a dramatist, — in fact, a 
literary jack-of -all-trades. The society in which 
he lived consisted in part of ' ' University Wits ' * 
like himself, in* part of the low men and women 
who haunted the vile taverns of the slums to 
prey upon such as he. "A world of black- 
guardism dashed with genius, ' ' it has been called 
and the phrase is fit enough. Among such sur- 
roundings Greene lived, and among them he 
died, bankrupt in body and estate, the victim of 
his own ill-governed passions. 

In conjunction with such men as this Shak- 
spere began his life-work. His first dramatic 
efforts were made in revising the plays of his 
predecessors with a view to their revival on the 
stage; and in Titus Andronicus and the first 
part of Henry VI. we have examples of this kind 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 27 

of work. The next step was probably the pro- 
duction of plays in collaboration with other 
writers, and to this practice, which he almost 
abandoned in the middle of his career, he seems 
to have returned in his later years in such plays 
as Pericles, Henry YIII., and The Tivo Nodle 
Kinsmen. How far Shakspere was of this disso- 
lute set to which his fellow- workers belonged it 
is impossible to tell; but we know that by and 
by, as he gained mastery over his art and be-, 
came more and more independent in work and 
in fortune, he left this sordid life behind him, 
and aimed at the establishment of a family. In 
half a dozen years from the time of -Greene's 
attack, he had reached the top of his profession, 
was a sharer in the profits of his theater, and 
had invested his savings in land and houses in 
his native town. The youth who ten years before 
had left Stratford poor and burdened with a 
wife and three children, had now become *' Wil- 
liam Shakspere, Gentleman." 

During these years Shakspere 's literary work 
was not confined to the drama, which, indeed, 
was tlien hardly regarded as a form of literature. 
In 1593 he published Venus and Adonis, and in 
1594, Lucrece, two poems belonging to a class 
of highly wrought versions of classical legends 
which was then fashionable, and of which Mar- 
lowe's Hero and Leander is the other most fa= 
mous example. For several years, too, in the last 



28 INTEODUCTION 

decade of the sixteenth century and the first 
few years of the seventeenth, he was composing 
a series of sonnets on love and friendship, in 
this also following a literary fashion of the 
time. Yet these give us more in the way of 
self -revelation than anything else he has left- 
From them we seem to be able to catch glimpses 
of his attitude toward his profession, and one of 
them makes us realize so vividly his perception 
of the tragic risks of his surroundings that it 
is set down here : 

0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
That did not better for my life provide 

Than public means which public manners breeds. 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 

And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: 

Pity me then and wish I were renewed; 
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink 

Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection; 
No bitterness that I will bitter think. 

Nor double penance to correct correction. 
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye 
Even that your pity is enough to cure me. 

It does not seem possible to avoid the inferences 
lying on the surface of this poem ; but whatever 
confessions it may imply, it serves, too, to give 
us the assurance that Shakspere did not easily 
and blindly yield to the temptations that sur- 
rounded the life of the theater of his time. 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMi\. 29 

For the theater of Shakspere's day was no 

very reputable affair. Externally it appears 

to us now a very meager apparatus — almost 

absurdly so, when we reflect on the grandeur of 

» the compositions for which it gave 

The -A n -1 

Elizabethan occasiou. A roughlv Circular 

Theater. . , . 

wooden building, with a roof over 
the stage and over the galleries, but with the pit 
often open to the wind and weather, having very 
little scenery and practically no attempt at the 
achievement of stage-illusion, such was the scene 
of the production of some of the greatest imagi- 
native works the world has seen. Nor was the 
audience very choice. The more respectable citi- 
zens of Puritan tendencies frowned on the 
theater to such an extent that it was found 
advisable to place the buildings outside the city 
limits and beyond the jurisdiction of the city 
fathers. The pit was thronged with a motley 
crowd of petty tradesfolk and the dregs of the 
town; the gallants of the time sat on stools on 
the stage, *' drinking" tobacco and chaffing the 
actors, their efforts divided between displaying 
their wit and their clothes. The actors were all 
male, the women's parts being taken by boys 
whose voices were not yet broken. The costumes, 
frequently the cast-off clothing of the gallants, 
were often gorgeous, but seldom appropriate. 
Thus the success of the performance had to de- 
pend upon the excellence of the piece, the merit 



30 INTEODUCTION '. , 

of the acting, and the rea<diness of appreciation 
of the audience. 

This last point, however, was more to be relied 
upon than a modern student might imagine. 
Despite their dubious respectability, the^ Eliza- 
bethan playgoers must have been of wonderfully 
keen intellectual susceptibilities. For clever 
feats in the manipulation of language, for puns, 
happy alliterations, delicate melody such as we 
find in the lyrics of the times, for the thunder 
of the pentameter as it rolls through the trage- 
dies of Marlowe, they had a practised taste. 
Qualities which we now expect to appeal chiefly 
to the literary appear to have been relished by 
men who could neither read nor write, and who 
at the same time enjoyed jokes which would be 
too .broad, and stage massacres which would be 
too bloody, for a modern audience of sensibilities 
much less acute in these other directions. In 
it all we see how far-reaching was the wonderful 
vitality of the time. 

This audience Shakspere knew, thoroughly, 

and in his writing he showed himself always, 

with whatever growth in per ma- 

C2 1-| c| 1^ c T) p t* A 's 

Dramatic ucut artistic Qualitics, the clever 

Development. 

man of business with his eye on 
the market. Thus we can trace throughout the 
course of his production two main lines: one 
indicative of the changes of theatrical fashions ; 
one, more subtle and more liable to misinter- 



SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 



31 



Eh 



O C5 



P3 
1-5 

1:1 
o 

s 

o 



o 



a _ 



-^'^ 



m 



^ '^ o 
O ^ M H <^ O 



H o 



>► 






CO fH 



o 

bjo 






^ 






(M 









w 

I— t 
Q 

o 



o "^ 

o 

00 



s 


O) 





s 





q; 


ci 


-t^ 


h-l 


fl 




O) 


O) 





0) 

> 







O 



>^ 



H^HO 



CO 

o 
o 

Oi 
LO 



g3 
P 



fH O 



fH be 
CO .3 

t> ^ rd 

O 



(D 



O 1—1 
C3 



S :^ H ^ ^ ^' H 






(D 



13 vd 



10 

en 






o 

CO 2 

9 ^ 

LO LO 



o 

CD 



tn S c<3 

.— ( aj 
> 53 



OJ 



Q p^ 



O 



r-H 02 CO 






a 

03 



fM 



CD • 1—1 

S J/' .-= -^ 

"^ -'-' t* 

s.g s ° 

0>HH 



^000 CD CO^'-O 



o 

I— I 

'D 



I— ( 

CO 



32 INTKODUCTIO^; 

pretation, sliowing the progress of his own 
spiritual growth. 

The chronology of Shakspere 's plays will prob- 
ably never be made out with complete assurance, 
but already much has been ascertained (1) from 
external evidence such as dates of acting or" 
publication, and allusions in other works, and 
(2) from internal evidence such as references 
to books or events of known date, and considera- 
tions of meter and language. The arrangement 
on page 31 represents what is probably an ap- 
proximately correct view of the chronological 
sequence of his works, though scholars are far 
from being agreed upon many of the details. 
. The first of these groups contains three com- 
edies of a distinctly experimental character, and 
a number of chronicle-histories, some of which, 
like the three parts of Henry YI., were almost 
certainly written in collaboration with other 
playwrights. The comedies are light, full of 
ingenious plays on words, and the verse is often 
rimed. The first of them., at least, shows the 
influence of Lyly. The histories ' also betray a 
considerable delight in language for its own 
sake, and the Marlowesque blank verse, at its 
best eloquent and highly poetical, not infre- 
quently becomes ranting, while th-e pause at the_ 
end, of each line tends to become monotonous. 
The extent of Shakspere 's share in Titus An- 
dronicus is still debated. 



SHAKSPEEE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 33 

The second period contains a group of com- 
edies marked by brilliance in the dialogue; 
wholesomeness, capacity, and high spirits in the 
main characters, and a pervading feeling of 
good-humor. The histories contain a larger 
comic element than in the first period, and are 
no longer suggestive of Marlowe. Rimes have 
become less frequent, and the blank verse has 
freed itself from the bondage of the end-stopped 
line. 

The plays of the third period are tragedies, or 
comedies with a prevailing tragic tone. Shak- 
spere here turned his attention to those elements 
in life which produce perplexity and disaster, 
and in this series of masterpieces we have his 
most magnificent achievement. His power of 
perfect adaptation of language to thought and 
feeling had now reached its height, and his verse 
had become thoroughly flexible without having 
lost strength. 

In the fourth period Shakspere returned to 
comedy. These plays, written during his last 
years in London, are again romantic in subject 
and treatment, and technically seem to show 
the influence of the earlier successes of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. But in place of the high 
spirits which characterized the comedies of the 
earlier periods we have a placid optimism, and 
a recurrence of situations which are more in- 
genious than plausible. The plots are marked 



34 INTEODUCTION 

by reunions and reconciliations and close in 
moods of repentance and forgiveness. The verse 
is singularly sweet and highly poetical ; and the 
departure from the end-stopped line has now 
gone so far that we see clearly the beginnings of 
that tendency which went to such an extreme 
in some of Shakspere's successors that it at 
times became hard to distinguish the meter at all. 

In Two Nohle Kinsmen and Henry VIII., 
Shakspere again worked in partnership, the 
collaborator being, in all probability, John 
Fletcher. 

Nothing that we know of Shakspere 's life from 
external sources justifies us in saying, as has 
frequently been said, that the changes of mood 
in his work from period to period corresponded 
to changes in the man Shakspere. As an artist 
he certainly seems to have viewed life now in 
this light, now in that; but it is worth noting 
that the period of his gloomiest plays coincides 
with the period of his greatest worldly pros- 
perity. It has already been hinted, too, that much 
of his change of manner and subject was dic- 
tated by the variations of theatrical fashion and 
the example of successful contemporaries. 

Throughout nearly the whole of these mar- 

velously fertile years Shakspere seems to have 

stayed in London; but from 1610 

lat^Yea'rs'f ^0 1612 he was making Stratford 

more and more his place of abode, 



SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DEAMA 35 

and at the same time he was beginning to write 
less. After 1611 he wrote only in collaboration ; 
and having spent about five years in peaceful 
retirement in the town from which he had set 
out a penniless youth, and to which he returned 
a man of reputation and fortune, he died on 
April 23, 1616. His only son, Hamnet, had 
died in boyhood; of his immediate family there 
survived him his wife and his two daughters, 
Susanna and Judith, both of whom were well 
married. He lies buried in the parish church 
of Stratford. 



36 ■ INTEODUCTION 



11 ROMEO AND JULIET 



, The most definite evidence with regard to the 
date of Borneo and Juliet is derived from the 
jj^^^ title page of the first Quarto, where 

it is stated that the play "hath 
bene often (with great applause) plaid pub- 
liquely, by the right Honourable the L. of 
Hunsdon his servants." The company referred 
to was known by this name only from July 22, 
1596, to' April 17, 1597 ; so that the play must 
have been composed at the latest before July, 
1596. Many critics have placed it as early as 
1591, on account of the Nurse's reference in I. iii. 
22 to the earthquake of eleven years before, iden- 
tifying this with an earthquake felt in England 
in 1580. But there is no assurance that there is 
any. such definiteness in the allusion; and, even 
when allowance has been made for the revision 
claimed on the title page of the second Quarto, 
the tragedy makes the impression of workman- 
ship somewhat more experienced than we find in 
such a play as Love's Lahour's Lost, usually 
assigned to 1591. Reminiscences of earlier 
writers and allusions in later books afford us no 
assistance. 

The evidence from meter and style points to 
an early date. There is much rime, arranged 
not only in couplets but alternately, in sextets, 



, EOMEO AND JULIET 37 

and even in the sonnet form. Some of the 
greatest passages are lyrical rather than dra- 
matic; and puns and ingenuities abound as in 
Shakspere's other works of the early nineties. 
But these characteristics do not require an earlier 
date than 1594 or 1595; and we may plausibly 
conjecture that it preceded by a short space A 
Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merchant 
of Venice, and followed soon after Richard II. 
Apart from the doubtful case of Titus Andron- 
icus, Romeo and Juliet is Shakspere 's first pure 
tragedy, a form he did not again attempt until 
near the end of the century, w^hen he wrote 
Julius Caesar. 

The earliest appearance of the play in print 
was in the first Quarto of 1597, a shortened 

and corrupt version apparently 
theT^^xt* printed from shorthand notes 

taken at the theater. In 1599 was 
issued the second Quarto, derived from an 
authentic manuscript, which not only gave the 
play much more accurately than its pirated 
predecessor had done, but claimed to be ''newly 
corrected, augmented, and amended." On this 
version (Qo) the present text is based, and 
from it was printed the third Quarto, 1609, the 
source in turn of a fourth Quarto and of the 
first Folio text. Occasionally, where the second 
Quarto is evidently wrong, readings have been 
taken from the first Quarto or the Folio. 



38 INTEODUCTION 

The germ of the story of Romeo and Juliet is 
very old and is found in many countries. A girl 

drinks a potion producing the 
themot** appearance of death in order to 

avoid a hated marriage, in a medie- 
val Greek romance called Ephesiaca, by Xeno- 
phon of Ephesus ; and a still closer approach to 
the ^ plot of our drama is made by an Italian 
story-teller, Massuccio of Salerno, in his Novelle^ 
1476. In a short novel by Luigi da Porto, pub- 
lished in Venice about 1530, the scene has be- 
come Verona, and the lovers have the names by 
which we know them. After re-tellings by Ban- 
dello in Italian (1554) and by Pierre Boistuau 
in French (1559), the tale appeared in medi- 
ocre English verse by a certain Arthur Brooke 
(1562), and five years later Boistuau 's ver- 
sion was translated into English prose in 
Painter's Palace of Pleasure.^ 

Arthur Brooke, in the preface to his poem, 
speaks of having seen the story recently on the 
stage. No record of such a performance is 
known. Cunliffe thinks it probably took place 
in the Inner Temple at Christmas, 1561; and 
Fuller has sought to show that a Dutch version 
of about 1630 can be made to give some idea of 
the lost play. But w^hether Shakspere knew the 
lost play or not (and there is no evidence that 

1. The versions of Brooke and Painter were reprinted by 
P. A. Daniel in Originals and Analogues, New Shakspere 
Society, 1875. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 39 

it was ever printed), it is quite clear that he is 
mainly and heavily indebted to Brooke's poem. 
Even minor characters are borrowed. The Nurse 
is already an entertaining figure in the source, 
and suggestions are given for Mercutio ; but the 
humor of the one and the brilliance of the other 
are vastly increased by the dramatist. Of the 
scenes invented by Shakspere, we may note the 
opening encounter of the servants of the rival 
houses, the introduction of the violent Tybalt at 
the Capulets' ball, and the visit of Paris to the 
tomb of Juliet with its fatal result. Juliet's 
age, which was sixteen in Brooke's poem, is 
reduced by Shakspere to fourteen. In the play 
the characters are much more life-like, and their 
emotions are given utterance with a far greater 
fervency and richness of poetry than in any 
earlier version. 

The forms of the story which have been men- 
tioned are all in the direct line of ancestry of 
the present tragedy. But there are many col- 
lateral versions, in verse and prose narrative 
and in drama, both before and after Shakspere ; 
and near the end of the sixteenth century an 
attempt had been made to write the legend 
into the actual history of Verona. Thus Shak- 
spere was not alone in perceiving the powerful 
appeal which lay in the story of the *' star- 
cross 'd lovers" and "the fearful passage of 
their death-mark 'd love." 



40 / INTEODUCTION 

Borneo and Juliet is written mainly in 
blank verse, which, since Marlowe, had been the 
i^e^er standard meter of the English 

. drama. Prose occurs in the scenes 
between servants, and is used for much of the 
dialogue when Mercutio is on the stage. This is 
in accordance with Shakspere 's practice of using 
prose for homely and realistic scenes, for low 
comedy, and for repartee. Rime is exceptionally 
abundant; couplets are frequent, as in I. ii. 
96-105 and I. v. 91-94 ; occasionally the rimes are 
alternate, as in I. v. 109-112 ; in I. ii. 46-51 we 
find six lines rimed like the sestet of a sonnet; 
and in I. v. 95-108 the rime-scheme of the Sliak- 
sperean sonnet is completely carried out. In 
several of these cases the effect of the rimes is to 
emphasize the lyric character of the speeches. 

The normal typ'e of the blank verse line has 
five iambic feet, that is, ten syllables with the 
verse accent falling on the even syllables. From 
this regular- form, however, Shakspere deviates- 
with great freedom, among the commonest varia- 
tions being the following: 

1. The addition of an eleventh syllable, e.g., 

How staiKls I your dis|posi|tions to ] be marr^ied, I. 

iii. 45. 
My blood | for your [ rude brawls j doth lie | a-bleedj 

ing; III. i. 192. 
I'll have I this knot | knit up | tomor|row m.OT\ning, IV. 

ii. 24. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 41 

This is also known as the feminine ending. 
It is comparatively infrequent in plays as early 
as Romeo and Juliet; The Tempest y for instance, 
having four or five times as many examples of it 
as the present pla}^ Occasionally the extra 
syllable occurs in the middle of the line, at the 
main pause known as the csesura, e.g.y 

Come, go, I good Jul[*e/. || I dare ] no longjer stay[, 
V. iii. 159. 

2. Frequently what seems an extra syllable 
is to be slurred in reading; but sometimes it is 
doubtful whether the author slurred it, or in- 
tended to substitute an anapest (i. e., a foot 
with two light syllables before the accent) for 
the normal iambic foot, e. g., 

Of all j the days | of the yearj, upon | that duy], I. iii. 24. 
Come Lam I mas-eve ] at night | shall slie be | fourteen], 

I. iii. 16. 
This letj^er he ear[ly bade ] me give | his fathjer, V. 
♦ iii. 275. 

3. Sometimes an emphatic syllable, or one 
accompanied by a pause, stands alone as a foot, 
without an unaccented syllable, e. g., 

Draw, I Benvojlio; ] beat down | their wea|pons, IIL 

i. 88. 
Courjage, man; | the hurt | cannot [ be much], IIL i. 97. 

4. Short lines, lacking one or more feet, 



42 INTKODUCTiON 

occur, especially at the beginning or end of a 
speech, e.g., 

Why, Romeo, art t^ou mad? I. ii. 54. 

I'll to my rest, I. v. 129. (End) 

I thought all for the best, III. i. 107. 

Romeo, away, be gone. III. i. 135. (Beginning) 

The lady stirs, Y. iii. 147. (End) 

5. Long lines of twelve syllables occur, 
though rarely in this play, e.g., 

Belonging to a man. be some other name, II. ii. 42. 

This may be regarded as an alexandrine, i. e., 
a line 6f six iambic feet; but often the extra 
syllables are due to the substitution of an ana- 
pest as in 2. above, or can be got rid of by 
vigorous slurring, e.g.. 

And yet j to my teen | he it spoken | I have | but four, 
I. iii. 12. 
' The form | of death. | Meantime ' I' wi'it | to Romjeo, 
V. iii. 246, 

^Yhere Romeo, as often, is dissyllabic. 

6. Frequently, especially in the first foot or 
after the cse^ura, a trochee is substituted for an 
iambus, i. e., the accent falls on the odd instead 
of on the even syllable, e.g., 

Sitting I in the sun, || under | the dove-house wall, I. 

iii. 26. '' 

Gallop I apace, you fiery-footed steeds, III. ii. 1. 
Hdppi\ness courts thee in his best array, III. iii. 142. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 43 

And fear'st to die? || Famine | is in thy cheeks, V. i. 69. 
Death, that | hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, V. 
iii. 92. 

It must be remembered, however, that the pro- 
nunciation of many words has changed since 
Shakspere's time. Examples are ''contrary" in 
I. V. 87; '"contract" (noun) in IL ii. 117; con- 
fessor" in IL vi. 21; "exile" in V. iii. 211; 
''detestable" in IV. v. 53 and V. iii. 45; recep- 
tacle" in IV. iii. 39. Especially characteristic 
are the dissyllabic endings in "devoti-on," 

IV. i. 41; "infecti-on," V. ii. 16; "pati-ence," 

V. i. 27; "marri-age," IV. i. 11; and the pro- 
nunciation of " r " with the value of a syllable in 

After the prompter, for our entrance, I. iv. 8, 
Farewell; commend me to thy mistress, II. iv. 188. 

Although differences betAveen the language of 
Shakspere and that of our own day are obvious 
Lang-nag-e ^^ ^^^ most casual reader, there is 

^ a risk that the student may under- 

estimate the extent of these differences, and, 
assuming that similarity of form implies identity , 
of meaning, miss the true interpretation. The 
most important instances of change of meaning 
are explained in the notes ; but a clearer view of 
the nature and extent of the contrast between 
the idiom of Romeo and Juliet and that of 
modern English will be gained by a classifica- 
,tion of the most frequent features of this con- 



44 INTEODUCTION 

trast. Some of the Shaksperean usages are 
mereiy results of the carelessness and freedom 
which the more elastic standards of the Eliza- 
bethan time permitted; others are forms of 
expression at that date quite correct, but now 
obsolete. 

1. .Nouns, {a) Shakspere frequently uses an 
abstract noun with " of " where modern English 
has an adjective; e.g., in I. iii. 50, "ladies of 
esteem ' ' = estimable ladies. 

(&) Nouns are used as adjectives somewhat 
more freely than today; e.g., "a grandsire 
phrase" in I. iv. 37. 

2. Adjectives, (a) So, conversely, adjec- 
tives are used as nouns, as in "that fair," for 
fair woman, in II. Prol. 3. 

(&) Adjectives are used as adverbs, as in 
"But new struck nine," I. i. 153; "passing 
fair," I. i. 226. 

(c) Double comparatives occur; e.g., 
"worser," II. iii. 29, III. ii. 106. 

3. Pronouns, {a) The nominative is often 
used for the objective ; e.g.. 

All my hopes but she, I. ii. 14. 

And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart, III. v. 84. 

(5) The neuter possessive is usually "his"; 
e.g.. 

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars 

Shall bitterly begin his fearful date, I. iv. 104, 105. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 45 

The sweetest honej 
Is loathsome in Ms own deliciousness, II. vi. 11, 12. 
The dagger hath ,mista 'en, — for, lo, Ms house, V. iii. 203. 

(c) The personal pronoun is often used 
where we use the reflexive, e.g., " Turn thee, 
Benvolio," I. i. 59; ''content thee," I. v. 67. 

(d) The ethical dative is commoner than in 
modern speech; e. g., ''ciaps me his sword," 
III. i. 6; "draws him on the drawer," III. i. 9, 
where "draws" is intransitive. 

(e) The modern distinctions among the rela- 
tive pronouns, who, which, that, as, are often 
not observed by Shakspere; e.g., "thou . . . 
which . . . abound 'st," III. iii. 123; "he which 
bore," V. iii. 250; "the winds who," I. i. 104; 
"that" (used non-restrictively), II. iii. 9. 

(/) The relative pronoun is oftener omitted 
than now; e.g.. 

Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me, I. iv. 32. 

(g) A reflexive is often inserted where none 
is needed now; e.g., "I have remembered me," 
I. iii. 8. 

4. Verbs, (a) A singular verb is often 
found with a plural subject, or with two or more 
subjects; e.g.. 

Whose misadventur 'd piteous overthrows 

Both with theii* death bury their parents' strife, I. Prol. 

7, 8. 
Here comes two of the house of Montagues, I. i. 23. 

Both our remedies 
Within thy help and holy physic lies, II. iii. 51, 52. 



46 INTEODUCTION 

What manners is in this? V. iii. 214. 

Where is my father and my mother, nurse? III. ii. 125. 

(&) The ''n" is frequently dropped from the 
ending of the past participle of strong verbs in 
cases where it is retained at the present day, e.g., 
"spoke," I. iv. 1, IV. i. 28; "broke," III. v. 40. 
Cf. also "holp," I. ii. 48, for "holpen," now 
"helped"; also "writ," I. ii. 43, 1. iii. 62; and 
' ' took " f or " taken, " I. v. 110. In ' ' strucken, ' ' 
I. i. 224, the "n" is retained where modern 
English has lost it. 

(c) The "d" of the past participle of weak 
verbs sometimes disappears; e.g., "create" for 
created, I. i. 169. 

{d) Verbs of motion are often omitted; e.g., 
"Shall we on?" I. iv. 2; "I'll to him," III. 
ii. 137. 

( e ) " Be " is sometimes used for ' ' are " ; e.g., 
"Where be these enemies?" V. iii. 291. 

(/)' ' The "to" of the infinitive is sometimes 
omitted where modern English requires it; e.g., 
"I entreated her come forth," V. iii. 260. 

{g) The infinitive with "to" is sometimes 
used where we emploj^ a gerundial or participial 
construction; e.g., 

Verona brags of him 
To 1)6 a virtuous and well-govern M youth, I, v. 69, 70. 
What mean these masterless and gory swords s 

To lie discolour 'd by this place of peace? V. iii. 142, 143. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 47 

(/i) Some verbs now only intransitive are at 
times used transitively or reflexively, and the 
converse also holds ; e. g., ' ' Some consequence 
. . . shall . . . expire the term," I. iv. 106; 
''hath stol'n him" (reflexive), II. i. 4; ''Can 
you like of Paris' love?" I. iii. 75; "this intru- 
sion shall now seeming sweet convert to bitt'rest 
gall," I. V. 93, 94. 

5. Adverbs. Double negatives are used with 
a merely intensive force; e.g.y "Nor no without- 
book prologue," I. iv. 7. 

6. Prepositions, {a) The usage in preposi- 
tions was less definitely fixed than it is today. 
Thus we have "the bud bit with an envious 
worm," I. i. 143 ; "not to be talked on," II. v. 42. 

(&) Prepositions are sometimes repeated or 
otherwise redundant; e. g., "wanting of thy 
love," II. ii. 78; "that fair for which love 
groan 'd for," II. Prol. 3. 

7. Conjunctions. A conditional conjunc- 
tion, instead of being repeated, is sometimes 
replaced by "that"; e.g.. 

If the measure of thy joy 
Be heaped like mine and that thy skill be more, II. vi. 
24, 25. 



ROMEO AND JULIET 

PROLOGUE . 

Chorus. Two households, both alike in dignity, 
In iair Verona, where we lay our scene, 
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, 
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. 
5 From forth the fatal loins of these two foes 
A pair of star-cross 'd lovers take their life ; 
"Whose misadventur 'd piteous overthrows 

Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. 
The fearful passage* of their death-mark 'd love, 
10 And the continuance of their parents' rage, 
Which, but their children's end, nought could re- 
move, 
, ■ Ig now the two hours ' traffic of our stage ; 
The which if you with patient ears attend, 
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. 



ACT I 

Scene I. [Verona. A piiblic place. 1 

Enter Sampson and Gregory^ of the house of 
Capulet, with swords and 'bucklers. 

Sam. Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals. 

Gre. No, for then we should be colliers. 

Sam. I mean, an we be in choler, we'll draw. 

Gre. Ay, while you live, draw your neck out o* 
the collar. 5 

Sam. I strike quickly, being mov'd. 

Gre. But thou art not quickly moved to strike. 

Sam. A dog of the house of Montague moves me. 

Gre. To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to 
stand; therefore, if thou art mov'd, thou run'stio 
away. 

Sam. A dog of that house shall move me to stand. 
I will take the wall of any man or maid of Mon- 
tague 's. 

Gre. That shows thee a weak slave ; for the weak- 15 
est goes to the wall. 

Sam. 'Tis true. ... 

Gre. The quarrel is between our masters and us 
their men. , 

52 



Act I. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 53 

20 Sam. 'Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant. 
When I have fonght with the men, I will be cruel 
with the maids ; I will cut off their heads. . . . 

Gre. Draw thy tool ; here comes two of the house 
of Montagues. 

Enter two other serving-men [Abraham and Bal- 

thasar] . 
25 Sam. My naked w^eapon is out. Quarrel, I will 
back thee. 

Gre. How ! turn thy back and run ? 
Sam. Fear me not. 
Gre. No, marry ; I f efir thee ! 
30 Sam. Let us take the law of our sides; let them 
begin. 

Gre. I will frown as I pass by, and let them take 
it as they list. 

Sam. Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at 
35 them ; which is disgrace to them, if they bear it. 
Ahr. Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? 
. Sam. I do bite my thumb, sir. 
Ahr. Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? 
Sam. [Aside to Gre.] Is the law of our side, il I 
40 say ay? 
Gre. No. 

Sam. No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir ; 
but I bite my thumb, sir. 
Gre. Do you quarrel, sir ? 
45 Ahr. Quarrel, sir? No, sir. 

Sam. But if you do, sir, I am for you. I serve as 
good a man as you. 



54 KOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. i. 

.Abr. No better. 
Sam. Well, sir. 

Enter Benvolio. 
Gre. Say ^'better"; here comes one of my mas- 50 
ter's kinsmen. 

Sam. Yes, better, sir. 
Ahr. You lie. 

Sam. Draw, if you be men. Gregory, remember 
thy swashing blow. They fight. 55 

Ben.' Fart, fools! 
Put up your swords ; you know not what you do. 

^ [Beats down their sivords.] 

Enter Tybalt. 
Tyh. What, art thou drawn among these heart- 
less hinds? 
Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death. 

J^en. I do but keep the peace. Put up thy sword, 60 
Or manage it to part these men with me. 

Tyh. What, drawn, and talk of peace ! I hate the 
• word 
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. 
Have at thee, coward ! They fight. 

Enter three or four Citizens [ayid Officers], with 
cliibs or partisans. 
Off. Clubs, bills, and partisans! Strike! Beat 
them down! 65 

Down with the Capulets ! down with the Montagues ! 
Enter Capulet in his gown, and Lady Capulet. 
Cap. What noise is this? Give me my long 
sword, ho ! 



Act I. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 55 

La. Cap. A crutch, a crutch ! why call you for a 

sword ? 
Cap. My sword, I say ! Old Montague is come, 
70 And flourishes his blade in spite of me. 

Enter Montague and Lady Montague. 
Mon. Thou villain Capulet, — Hold me not, let 

me go. 
La. Mon. Thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a 
foe. 

Enter Prince, with Ms train. 
Prin. Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, 
Profaners of this neighboiir-stained steel, — 
"Will they not hear ? — Wliat, ho ! you men, you 
75 beasts. 

That quench the fire of your pernicious rage 
With purple fountains issuing from your veins, 
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands 
Throw your distemper 'd weapons to the ground, 
80 And hear the sentence of your moved prince. 
Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word. 
By thee, old Capulet, and Montague, 
Have thrice disturb 'd the quiet of our streets. 
And made Verona's ancient citizens 
85 Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments, 
To wield old partisans, in hands as old, 
Cank'red with peace, to part your cank'red hate; 
If ever you disturb our streets again 
Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace. 
90 For this time, all the rest depart away. 
You, Capulet, shall go along with me ; 



56 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. i. 

And, Montague, come you this afternoon, 
To know our farther pleasure in this case, 
To old Free-town, our common judgment-place. 
Once more, on pain of death, all men depart. 95 

Exeunt [all hut Montague, Lady Montague, and 

Benvolio] . 

Mon. Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach ? 
Speak, nephew, were you by when it began ? 

Ben. Here were the servants of your adversary. 
And yours, close figlating ere I did approach. 
I drew to part them. In the instant came 100 

The fiery Tybalt, with his sword prepar'd. 
Which, as he breath 'd defiance to my ears, 
He swung about his head and cut the winds, 
Who, nothing hurt withal, hiss 'd him in scorn. 
While we were interchanging thrusts and blows, 105 
Came more and more and fought on part and part, 
Till the Prince came, who parted either part. 

La. Mon. 0, where is Romeo? Saw you him 
to-day ? 
Right glad I am he was not at this fray. 

Ben. Madam, an hour before the worshipp 'd sun no 
Peer 'd forth the golden window of the east, 
A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad ; 
Where, underneath the grove of sycamore * i 

That westward rooteth from the city's side. ■ 

So early walking did I see your son. 115 

Towards him I made, but he was ware of me 
And stole into the covert of the wood. 
I, measuring his affections by my own. 



Act I. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 57 

Which then most souglit where most might not be 
found, 

120 Being one too many by my weary self, 
Pursued my humour not pursuing his, 
And gladly shunn 'd who gladly fled from me. 

Mon. Many a morning hath he there been seen, 
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew, 

L25 Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs ; 
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun 
Should in the farthest east begin to draw 
The shady curtains from Aurora 's bed, 
Away from light steals home my heavy son, 

L30 And private in his chamber pens himself. 
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out, 
And makes himself ^n artificial night. 
Black and portentous must this humour prove 
Unless good counsel may the cause remove. 

.35 Ben. My noble uncle, do you know the cause? 
Mon. I neither know it nor can learn of him. 
Ben. Have you importun 'd him by any means ? 
Mon. Both by myself and many other friends ; 
But he, his own affections ' counsellor, 

.40 Is to himself — I will not say how true — 
But to himself so secret and so close, 
So far from sounding and discovery. 
As is the bud bit with an envious worm 
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air 

.45 Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. 

Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow, 
We would as willingly give cure as know. 



58 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. i. 

Enter Ro*meo. 

Ben. See, where lie comes! So please you, step 
aside ; 
I '11 know his grievance or be much deni 'd. 

Mon. I would thou wert so happy by thy stay 150 
To hear true shrift. Come, madam, let 's away 

Exeunt [Montague and Lady]. 

Ben. Good morrow, cousin. 

Rom. Is the day so young ? 

Ben. But new struck nine. 

Rom. Ay me ! sad hours seem long. 

Was that my father that went hence so fast ? 

Ben. It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's 
hours? . 155 

Rom. Not having that which,, having, makes them 
short. 

Ben. In love ? 

Rom. Out — 

Ben. Of love? 

Rom. Out of her favour, where I am in love. 160 

Ben. Alas, that Love, so gentle in his view, 
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof ! 

Rom. Alas, that Love, whose view is muffled still. 
Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will ! 
Where shall we dine ? me ! What fray was here ? 165 
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all. 
Here 's much to do with hate, but more with love. 
Why, then, O brawling love ! loving hate ! 
O anything, of nothing first create ! 
O heavy lightness ! serious vanity ! 170^ 



Act I. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 59 

Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms ! 
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health ! 
Still- waking sleep, that is not what it is ! 
This love feel I, that feel no love in this. 
175 Dost thou not langh ? 

Ben. No, coz, I rather weep. 

Eom. Good heart, at what ? 

Ben. At thy good heart 's oppression. 

Rom. Why, such is love's transgression. 
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast. 
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest 
180 With more of thine. This love that thou hast shown 
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own. 
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs ; 
Being purg 'd, a fire sparkling in lovers ' eyes ; 
Being vex'd, a sea nourish 'd with lovers' tears. 
185 What is it else ? A madness most discreet, 
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet. 
Farewell, my coz. 

Ben. Soft ! I will go along. 

An if you leave me so, you do me wrong. 

Rom. Tut, I have left myself ; I am not here. 
190 This is not Romeo ; he's some otherwhere. 

Be7i. Tell me in sadness, who is that you love? 

Rom. What, shall I groan and tell thee? 

Ben. Groan ! why, no ; 

• But sadly tell me who. 

Rom. Bid a sick man in sadness make his will, — 
195 Ah, word ill urg 'd to one that is so ill ! 
In sadness, cousin, I do love a wpman. 



60 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. i. 

Ben. I aim'd so near, when I suppos'd you lov'd. 

Bom. A right good mark-man! And she's fair I 
love. 

Ben. A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit. 

Rom. Well, in that hit you miss. She'll not be 
tit 200 

With Cupid 's arrow ; she hath Dian 's wit ; 
And, in strong proof of chastity well arm'd, 
'Gainst Love's weak childish bow she lives un- 

harm 'd. 
She will not stay the siege of loving terms, 
Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes, 205 

Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold. 
O, she is rich in beauty, only poor 
That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store. 

Ben. Then she hath sworn that she will still live 
chaste ? 

Rom. She hath, and in that sparing makes huge 
waste ; 21 1 

For beauty starv 'd with her severity 
Cuts beauty off from all posterity. 
She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair. 
To merit bliss by making me despair. 
She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow 215 

Do I live dead that live to tell it now. 
^ Ben. Be rul'd by me, forget to think of her. 

Rom. 0, teach me how I should forget to think. 

Ben. By giving liberty unto thine eyes; 
Examine other beauties. 

Rom. 'Tis the way 220 



Act I. Sc. ii.] ROMEO AND JULIET. 61 

To call hers, exquisite, in question more. 
These happy masks that kiss fair ladies ' brows 
Being black puts us in mind they hide the fair ; 
He that is strucken blind cannot forget 

25 The precious treasure of his eyesight lost. 
Show me a mistress that is passing fair, 
What doth her beauty serve, but as a note 
Where I may read who pass 'd that passing fair ? 
Farewell ! Thou canst not teach me to forget. 

30 Be7i, I'll pay that doctrine, or else die in debt. 

"^ Exeunt. 

Scene II. [A street.] 

Enter Capulet, Paris, and the Clown [a Servant]. 

Cap. But Montague is bound as well as I, 
In penalty alike ; and 'tis not hard, I think, 
For men as old as we to keep the peace. 

Par. Of honourable reckoning are you both ; 
5 And pity 'tis you liv 'd at odds so long. 
But now, my lord, what say you to my suit? 

Cap. But saying o 'er what I have said before. 
My child is yet a stranger in the world ; 
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years. 
LO Let two more summers wither in their pride, 
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride. 

Par. Younger than she are happy mothers made. 
Cap. And too soon marr'd are those so early 
made. 



62 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. ii. 

The earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she, 

She is the hopeful lady of my earth ; 15 

But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart, «, 

My will to her consent is but a part ; 

An she agree, within her scope of choice 

Lies my consent and fair according voice. 

This night I hold an old accustom 'd feast, 20 

Whereto I have invited many a guest. 

Such as I love ; and you, among the store 

One more, most welcome, makes my number more. 

At my poor house look to behold this night 

Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light. 25 

Such comfort as do lusty young men feel 

When well-apparell 'd April on the heel 

Of limping winter treads, even such delight 

Among fresh female buds shall you this night 

Inherit at my house ; hear all, all see, 30 

And like her most whose merit most shall be. 

Which on more view of, many, mine being one. 

May stand in number, though in reckoning none. 

Come, go with me. [To Servant.] Go, sirrah. 

trudge about 
Through fair Verona ; find those persons out 35 

Whose names are written there, and to them say 
My house and welcome on their pleasure stay. 

Exeunt [Capulet and Paris]. 
Serv. Find them out whose names are written , 
here ! It is written, that the shoemaker should 
meddle with his yard, and the tailor with his last, 40 
the fisher with his pencil, and the painter with his 
nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose 



Act I. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 63 

names are here writ, and can never find what names 
the writing person hath here writ. I must to the 
45 learned. — In good time. 

Enter Benvolio and Romeo. 
Ben. Tut, man, one fire burns out another 's burn- 
ing, 
One pain is lessen 'd by another's anguish; 
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning ; 
One desperate grief cures with another's lan- 
guish. 
50 Take thou some new infection to thy eye, 
And the rank poison of the old will die. 

Bom. Your plaintain-leaf is excellent for that. 
Ben. For what, I pray thee ? 
Rom. For your broken shin. 

Ben. Why, Romeo, art thou mad ? 
55 Rom. Not mad, but bound more than a mad- 
man is ; 
Shut up in prison, kept without my food, 
Whipp 'd and tormented and — God-den, good fel- 
low. ^ 

7 

Serv. God gi' god-den. I pray, sir, can you 
read ? 
60 Rom. Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. 

Serv. Perhaps you have learn 'd it without book. 
But, I pray, can you read anything you see ? 

Rom. Ay, if I know the letters and the language. 
Serv. Ye say honestly. Rest you merry ! 
65 Rom. Stay, fellow ; I can read. 

(Reads.) ''Signior Martino and his wife and 



64 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. ii. 

daughters; County Anselme and his beauteous sis- 
ters ; the lady widow of Vitruvio ; Signio;i? Placentio 
and his lovely nieces; Mercutio and his brother 
Valentine ; mine uncle Capulet, his wife, and 70 
daughters ; py fair niece Kosaline ; Livia ; Signior 
Valentio and his cousin Tybalt; Lucio and the 
lively Helena." 
A fair assembly : whither should they come ? 

Serv. Up. 75 

Rom, Whither? 

Serv. To supper ; to our house. 

Rom. Whose house? 

Serv. My master's. 

Rom. Indeed, I should have ask'd you that be- 80 
fore. 

Serv. Now I '11 tell you without asking. My mas- 
ter is the great rich Capulet ; and if you be not of 
the house of Montagues, I pray, come and crush a 
cup of wine. Rest you merry ! [Exit. 85 

Ben. At this same ancient feast of Capulet 's 
Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so loves, 
With all the admired beauties of Yerona. 
Go thither ; and, with unattainted eye. 
Compare her face with, some that I shall show, 90 

And I will make thee think thy swan a crow. 

Rom. When the devout religion of mine eye 

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires ; 
And these, who, often drown 'd, could never die, 

Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars ! 95 



Act I. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 65 

One fairer than my love ! The all-seeing sun 
Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun. 

Ben. Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by, 
Herself pois'd with herself in either eye; 
100 But in that crystal scales let there be weigh 'd 
Your lady's love against some other maid 
That I will show you shining at this feast, 
And she shall scant show well that now seems best. 
Rom. I '11 go along no such sight to be shown, 
105 But to rejoice in splendour of my own. 

J_Exeunt.] 



Scene III. [A room in Capulet's houses.] 

Enter Lady Capulet and Nurse. 

La. Cap. Nurse, where 's my daughter? Call her 

forth to me. . . 
Nurse. I bade her come. What, lamb! What, 
ladybird ! 
God forbid ! — Where 's this girl ? What, Juliet ! 

Enter Juliet. 
Jul. How now ! Who calls ? 
Nurse. Your mother. 

Jul. Madam, I am here. 

5 What is your will? 

La. Cap. This is the matter. — Nurse, give leave a 
while, 



66 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. iii. 

We must talk in secret. — Nurse, come back again ; 
I have rememb'red me, thou's hear our counsel. 
Thou know'st my daughter's of a pretty age. 

Nurse. Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour. 10 

La. Cap. She's not fourteen. 

Nurse. I'll lay fourteen of my teeth, — 

And yet, to my teen be it spoken, I have but four, — 
She is not fourteen. How long is it now 
To Lammas-tide ? 

La. Cap. A fortnight and odd days. 

Nurse. Even or odd, of all days in the year, 15 
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen. 
Susan and she — (rod rest all Christian souls ! — 
"Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God ; 
She was too good for me. But, as I said. 
On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen ; 20 
That shall she, marry; I remember it well. 
'T is since the earthquake now^ eleven years ; 
And she was w^ean'd, — I never shall forget it — 
Of all the days of the year, upon that day. 
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, 25 

Sitting in the sun under the dove-house w^all; 
My lord and you were then at Mantua ; — 
Nay, I do bear a brain ; -^ but, as I said. 
When it did taste the w^ormw^ood on the nipple 
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, 30 

To see it techy and fall out wi' the dug! 
Shake, quoth the dove-house ; 't was no need, I trow. 
To bid me trudge. 
And since that time it is eleven years; 



Act I. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. . 67 

35 For then she could stand high-lone; nay, by the 
rood, 
She could have run and waddled all about; 
For even the day before, she broke her brow. . . . 
La. Cap. Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy 

peace. ... 
Nurse. Peace, I have done. God mark thee to 
his grace ! 
40 Thou wast the prettiest babe that e 'er I nurs 'd. 
An I might live to see thee married once, 
I have my wish. 

La. Cap. Marry, that ''marry" is the very theme 
I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet, 
45 How stands your dispositions to be married? 
Jul, It is an honour that I dream not of. 
Nurse. An honour ! were not I 'thine only nurse, 
I would say thou hadst suck'd v/isdom from thy 
teat. 
La. Cap. Well, think of marriage now; younger 
than you, 
50 Here in Verona, ladies of esteem. 

Are made already mothers. By my count, 
I was your inother much upon these years 
That you are now a maid. Thus then in brief: 
The valiant Paris seeks you for his love. 
55 Nurse. A man, young lady ! Lady, such a man 
As all the world — w^hy , he 's a man of wax. 

La. Cap. Verona's summer hath not such a flower. 
Nurse. Nay, he 's a flower ; in faith, a very flower. 



68 } EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. iii. 

La. Cap. What say you ? Can you love the gen- 
tleman? 
This night you shall behold him at our feast ; 60 

Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face 
And find delight writ there with beauty's pen; 
Examine every married lineament 
And see how one another lends content, 
And what obscur'd in this fair volume lies 65 

Find written in the margent of his eyes. 
This precious book of love, this unbound lover, 
To beautify him, only lacks a cover. 
The fish lives in the sea, and 't is much pride 
For fair without, the fair within to hide. 70 

That book in many's ej^-es doth share the glory. 
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story ; 
So shall you share all that he doth possess, 
By having him, making yourself no less. . . . 
Speak briefly, can you like of Paris' love? 75 

Jul. I'll look to like, if looking liking move; 
But no more deep will I endart mine eye 
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly. 
Enter Servant. 

Serv. Madam, the guests are come, supper serv'd 
up, you call'd, my young lady ask'd for, the nurse 80 
curs'd in the pantry, and everything in extremity. 
I must hence to wait ; I beseech you, follow straight. 

Exit. 

La. Cap. We follow thee. Juliet, the County 
stays. 

Nurse. Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days. 

Exeinit. 



Act I. Sc. iv.] EOMEO ANP JULiIET. 69 



Scene IY. [A street.] 

Enter Homeo, Mercutio, Benvolto, with five or six 
other Maskers, Torch-bearers. 

Bom. What, shall this speech be spoke for our 
excuse ? 
Or shall we on without apology ? 

Ben. The date is out of such prolixity. 
We 11 have no Cupid hoodwink 'd with a scarf, 
5 Bearing a Tartar's painted bow of lath, 
Scaring the ladies like 'a crow-keeper ; 
[Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke 
After the prompter, for our entrance;] 
But let them measure us by what they will, 
10 We 11 measure them a measure and be gone. 

Bom. Give me a torch. I am not for this ambling ; 
Being but heavy, I will bear the light. 
Mer. Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance. 
Bom. Not I, believe me. You have dancing shoes 
15 With nimble soles ; I have a soul of lead 
So stakes me to the ground I cannot move. 

Mer. You are a lover; borrow Cupid's wings, 
And soar with them above a common bound. 
Bom. I am too sore enpierced with his shaft 
20 To soar with his light feathers, and so bound 
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe. 
Under love 's heavy burden do I sink. 



70 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. iv. 

Mer. And, to sink in it, should you burden love ; 
Too great oppression for a tender thing. 

Bom. Is love a tender thing ? It is too rough, 25 

Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. 

Mer. If love be rough with you, be rough with 
love; 
Prick love with pricking, and you beat love down. — 
Give me a case to put my visage in, 

[Futs on a mask.] 
A visor for a visor ! what care I 30 

What curious eye doth quote deformities? 
Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me. 

Ben. Come, knock and enter; and no sooner in. 
But every man betake him to his legs. 

Bom. A torch for me ; let wantons light of heart 35 
Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels, 
For I am proverb 'd with a grandsire phrase : 
I'll be a candle-holder, and look on. 
The game was ne'er so fair, and I am done. 

Mer. Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own 
word. ^ 40 

If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire 
Of this sir-reverence love, wherein thou stickest 
Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho! 

Bom. Nay, that's not so. 

Mer. I mean, sir, in delay 

We waste our lights in vain, light lights by day. 45 
Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits 
Five times in that ere once in our five wits. 

Bom. And we mean well in going to this mask; 



Act I. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JULIET. ' 71 

But 't is no wit to go. 

Mer. W)iy, may one ask? 

50 Rom. I dream 'd a dream to-niglit. 

Mer. And so did I. 

Rom. Well, what was yours? 
Mer. That dreamers often lie. 

Rom. In bed asleep, while they do dream things 

true. 
Mer. 0, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with 
you. 
She is the fairies ' midwife, and she comes 
55 In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 
On the* fore-finger of an alderman, 
Drawn with a team of little atomies 
^ver men 's noses as they lie asleep ; 
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs, 
60 The cover of the wings of grasshoppers. 
Her traces of the smallest spider web. 
Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, 
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film, 
Her wagoner a small gray-coated gnat, 
65 Not half so big as a round little worm 
Prick 'd from the lazy finger of a maid ; 
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut 
Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, 
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers. 
70 And in this state she gallops night by night 

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of 

love ; 
On courtiers ' knees, that dream on curtsies straight ; 



72 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. iv. 

O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees; 
O 'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream, 
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, 
Because their breath with sweetmeats tainted are. 
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose, 
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit ; 
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail 
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep, 
Then he dreams of another benefice. 
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck, 
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, 
Of breaches, ambuseadoes, Spanish blades, 
Of healths five fathom deep ; and then ano» 
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes. 
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two 
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab 
That plats the manes of horses in the night, 
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs. 
Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes. . . . 
This is she — 

Eom. Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! 

Thou talk'st of nothing. 

Mer. True, I talk of dreams, 

Which are the children of an idle brain. 
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, 
Which is as thin of substance as the air 
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes 
Even now the frozen bosom of the north, 
And, being anger 'd, puffs away from thence, 
Turning bis face to the dew-dropping south. 



Act I. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 73 

Ben. This wind you talk of blows us from our- 
selves. 
Supper is done, and we shall come too late. 

Bom. I fear, too early; for my mind misgives 
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars 
)5 Shall bitterly begin his fearful date 
With this night's revels, and expire the term 
Of a despised life clos'd in my breast 
By some vile forfeit of untimely death. 
But He that hath the steerage of my course 
1^0 Direct my sail ! On, lusty gentlemen ! 
Ben. Strike, drum. 

They anarch about the stage. 
[Exeunt.] 



Scene Y. [A hall in Capulet's house.] 

[Musicians waiting.] Enter Serving-men, tvith 

napkins. 

[1.] Serv. Where's Potpan, that he helps not to 
take away ? He shift a trencher ! He scrape a 
trencher ! 

[2.] Serv. When good manners shall lie all in 
5 one or two men's hands, and they unwash'd too, 'tis 
a foul thing. 

[1.] Serv. Away with the joint-stools, remove 
the court-cupboard, look to the plate. Good thou, 



74 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. v. 

save me a piece of marchpane; and, as thou loves 
me, let the porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell. 10 
Antony and Potpan ! 

2. Serv. Ay, boy, ready. 

[1.] Serv. You are look'd for and call'd for, 
ask'd for and sought for, in the great chamber. 

3. Serv. We cannot be here and there too, 15 
Cheerly, boys ; be brisk a while, and the longer liver 
take all. [They retire.] 
Enter [Capulet, with Juliet and others of his 

house, meeting] the Guests a7id Maskers. 

Cap. Welcome, gentlemen ! Ladies that have 

their toes 
Unplagu'd with corns will walk a bout with you. 
Ah, my mistresses, which of you all 20 

Will now deny to dance ? She that makes dainty. 
She, I'll swear^ hath corns. Am I come near ye 

now^ ? 
Welcome, gentlemen ! I have seen the day 
That I have worn a visor and could tell 
A whispering tale in a fair lady's ear, . 25 

Such as would please ; 't is gone, 't is gone, 't is 

gone. 
You are welcome, gentlemen ! Come, musicians, 

play. Music plays, and they dance. 

A hall, a hall ! give room ! and foot it, girls. 
More light, you knaves ; and turn the tables up, 
And quench the fire, the room is grown too hot. 30 

Ah, sirrah, this unlook'd-for sport comes well. 



1 



Act I. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 75 

Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capnlet, 
For you and I are past our dancing days. 
How long is 't now since last yourself and I 
Were in a in ask? 
35 2. Cap. By 'r lady, tliirtj^ years. 

Cap. What, man ! 't is not so much, 't is not so 
much. 
T is since the nuptial of Lucentio, 
Come Pentecost as quickty as it will, 
'Some five and twenty years; and then we mask'd. 
2 Cap. 'T is more, 't is more. His son is elder, 
W sir; 

His son is thirty. 

Cap. Will you tell me that ? 

His son was but a ward two years ago. 

Rom. [To a Serving-man.] What lady's that 
which doth enri<^h the hand 
Of yonder knight? 
t5 Serv. I know not, sir. 

Eom. 0, she doth teach the torches to burn 
bright ! 
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night 
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; 
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear ! 
iO So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, 
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. 
The measure done, I '11 watch her place of stand, 
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. 
Did my heart love till now ? Forswear it, sight ! 
;5 For I ne 'er saw true beauty till this night. 



76 EOMEO AND JULIET [Act I. Sc. v. 

Tyh. This, by his voice, should be a Montague. 
Fetch me my rapier, boy. What dares the slave 
Come hither, cover 'd with an antic face. 
To fleer and scorn at our solemnity ? 
Now, by the stock and honour of my kin, 60 

To strike him dead I hold it not a sin. 

Cap. Why, how now, kinsman ! wherefore storm 
you so? 

Tylj. Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe, 
A villain that is hither come in spite 
To scorn at our solemnity this night. 65 

Cap. Young Romeo is it ? 

Tyl). 'T is he, that villain Romeo. 

Cap. Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone, 
'A bears him like a portly gentleman ; 
And, to say truth, Verona brags of him 
To be a virtuous and well-govern 'd youth. 70 

,1 would not for the wealth of all this tow^n 
Here in my house do him disparagement ; 
Therefore be patient, take no note of him ; 
It is my will, the which if thou respect, 
Show^ a fair presence and put off these frowns, 75 

An ill-beseeming semblance for a feast. 

Tyl). It fits, when such a villain is a guest. 
I'll not endure him. 

Cap. He shall be endur'd. 

Am I the master here, or you ? Go to ! 
Wliat, goodman boy ! I say, he shall ; go to ! 80 

You '11 not endure him ! God shall mend my soul ! 
You '11 make a mutiny among my guests ! 



Act I. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 77- 

You will set cock-a-lioop ! You'll be the man ! 
Tylj. Why, uncle, 'tis a shame. 
Cap. Go to, go to ; 

85 You are a saucy boy. Is 't so, indeed? 

This trick may chance to scathe jou ; I know what. 
You must contrary me ! Marry, 't is time. — 
Well said, my hearts ! — You are a princox ; go ; 
Be quiet, or — More light, more light ! — for shame ! 
90 1 '11 make you quiet. — What, cheerly, my hearts ! 

Tyh. Patience perforce with wdlful choler meet- 
ing 
]\Iakes my flesh tremble in their different greeting. 
I will withdraw ; but this intrusion shall 
Now seeming sweet convert to bitt'rest gall. [Exit. 
95 Eom. [To Juliet. ] If I profane with my unworthiest 
hand 
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this : 
]My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand 

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. 
Jul. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too 
much, 
100 Which mannerly devotion shows in this; 

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do 
touch, 
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss. 
Rom. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? 
Jul. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in 
prayer. 
1-05 2?om. 0, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do ; 
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. 



78 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act I. Sc. v. 

Jul.- Saints do not move, though grant for 

prayers' sake. 
Rom. Then move not, while my prayer's effect I 
take. 
Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg'd. 

[Kissing her.] 
Jul. Then have my lips the sin that they have 

took. 110 

Rom. Sin from my lips? trespass sweetly 

urg'd! 
Give me my sin again. [Kissing her again.] 

Jul. You kiss by the book. 

Nurse. Madam, your mother craves a word with 

you 
Rom. What is her mother? 
Nurse. Malrry, bachelor, 

Her mother is the lady of the house, 115 

And a good lady, and a wise and virtuous. 
I nurs'd her daughter, that you talk'd withal; 
I tell you, he that can lay hold of her 
Shall have the chinks. 

Rom. Is she a Capulet ? 

dear account ! my life is my foe^s debt. 120 
Ben. Away, be gone ; the sport is at the best. 
Rom. Ay, so I fear ; the more is my unrest. 

Cap. Nay, gentlemen, prepare not to be gone; 
We have a trifling foolish banquet towards. 
Is it e 'en so ? Why, then, I thank you all ; 125 

1 thank you, honest gentlemen ; good-night. 
More torches here ! Come on then, let's to bed. 



Act I. Sc. v.] ROMEO AND JULIET. 79 

All, sirrah, by my fay, it waxes late; 
I '11 to my rest. 

[All hut Juliet and Nurse begin to go out.] 
130 Jul. Come hither, nurse. What is yond gentle- 
man? 
Nurse. The son and heir of old Tiberio. 
Jul. What 's he that now is going out of door ? 
Nurse. Marry, that, I think, be young Petruchio. 
Jul. What 's he that follows there, that would not 
dance ? 
135 Nurse. I know not. 

Jul. Go, ask his name.^— If he be married. 
My grave is like to be my wedding-bed. 

Nurse. His name is Romeo, and a Montague; 
The only son of your great enemy. 
140 Jul. My only love sprung from my only hate ! 
Too early seen unknown, and known too late ! 
Prodigious birth of love it is to me 
That I must love a loathed enemy. 
Nurse. What's this? what's this? 
Jul. A rhyme I learn 'd even now 

145 Of one I danc 'd withal. 

One calls within, ' ' Juliet 
Nurse. Anon, anon! 

Come, let's away; the strangers all are gone. 

Exeunt. 



>y 



ACT II - 

[prologue] 

Chor. Now old Desire doth in his death-bed lie, 

And young Affection gapes to be his heir; 
That fair for which love groan 'd for and would die, 

"With tender Juliet match 'd, is now not fair. 
Now Romeo is belov'd and loves again, 5 

Alike bewitched by the charm of looks, 
But to his foe suppos'd he must complain, 

And she steal love's sweet bait from fearful 
hooks. 
Being held a foe, he may not have access 

To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear ; 10 

And she as much in love, her means much less 

To meet her new-beloved anywhere. 
But passion lends them power, time means, to meet. 
Temp 'ring extremities with extreme sweet. 

[Exit,] 

Scene I. [A lane hy the wall of Capiilet's orchard.] 

Enter Romeo^ alone. 

Rom. Can I go forward when my heart is here? 
Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out. 

[He climbs the wall, and leaps down within it.] 

80 



Act II. Sc. i.] ROMEO AND JULIET. . 81 

Enter Benvolio with Mercutio. 
Ben. Romeo ! my cousin Romeo ! 
Mer. He is wise ; 

And, on my life, hath' stol 'n him home to bed. 
5 Ben. He ran this way, and leap'd this orchard 
wall. 
Call, good Mercutio. 

3Ie7\ Nay, I'll conjure too. 

Romeo ! humours ! madman ! passion ! lover ! 
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh ! 
Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied ; 
10 Cry but ' ' Ay me ! " pronounce but ' ' love ' ' and 
"dove"; 
Speak to my gossip Yenus one fair word. 
One nick-name for her purblind son and heir, 
Young Abraham Cupid, he that shot so trim, 
When King Cophetua lov 'd the beggar-maid I 
15 He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not ; 
The ape is dead, and I must conjure him. 
I conjure thee by Rosaline 's bright eyes, 
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip, . . . 
That in thy likeness thou appear to us ! 
20 Ben. An if he hear thee, thou wilt anger him. 
Mer. This cannot anger him. . . . 

. . . my invocation 
Is fair and honest ; in his mistress ' name 
I conjure only but to raise up him. 
25 Ben. Come, he hath hid himself among these 
trees. 
To be consorted with the humorous night. 



82 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. So. ii. 

Blind is his love and best befits the dark. 

Mer. If Love be blind, Love cannot hit the 
mark. ... 
E^omeo, good-night ; 1 11 to my truckle-bed ; 
This field-bed is too cold for me to sleep. 30 

Come, shall we go ? 

Ben. Go, then; for 'tis in vain 

To seek him here that means not to be found. 

Exeunt [Ben. and Mer.}. 



Scene II. [Capiilet's orchard.] 

[Romeo advances from the wall.] 

Rom. He jests at scars that never felt a wound. 

[Jidiet appears above at her window.] 

But, soft! what light through yonder window 

breaks ? 
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. 
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon. 
Who is already sick and pale with grief 5 

That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. 
Be not her maid, since she is envious ; 
Her vestal livery is but sick and green, 
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. 
It is my lady, 0, it is my love ! 10 

O, that she knew she were ! 
She speaks, yet she says nothing ; what of that 1 
Her eye discourses ; I will answer it. — 



i 



Act II. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. ♦ 83 

I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks. 
15 Two of t^ie fairest stars in all the heaven, 
Having some business, do entreat her eyes 
To twinkle in their spheres till they return. 
What if her eyes were there, they in her head ? 
The brightness of her cheek would shame those 
stars, . 
20 As daylight doth a lamp ; her eyes in heaven 
Would through the airy region stream so bright 
That birds would sing and think it were not night. 
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand ! 
0, that I were a glove upon that hand, 
25 That I might touch that cheek ! 

Jul. Ay me ! 

Bom. She speaks! 

0, speak again, bright angel! for thou art 
As glorious to this night, being o 'er my head, 
As is a winged messenger of heaven 
Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes 
30 Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him 
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds 
■ And sails upon the bosom of the air. 

Jul. Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou 
Romeo ? 
Deny thy father and refuse thy name ; ' . 

35 Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love. 
And 1 11 no longer be a Capulet. 

Bom. [Aside.] Shall I hear more, or shall I 

speak at this? 
Jul. 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy ; 



84 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IL Sc. ii. 

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. 

What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot. 40 

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part 

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! 

What's in a name? That which we call a rose 

By any other word would smell as sweet; 

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, 45 

Retain that dear perfection which he owes 

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name. 

And for thy name which is no part of thee 

Take all myself. 

Bom. I take thee at thy word. 

Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd; 50 

Henceforth I never wall be Romeo. 

Jul. What man are thou that thus bescreen'd in 
night 
So stumblest on my counsel? 

Rom. By a name 

I know not how to tell thee who I am. 
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, 55 

Because it is an enemy to thee ; 
Had I it written, I would tear the word. 

Jul. My ears have yet not drunk a hundred 
words 
Of thy tongue's uttering, yet I know the sound. 
Art thou not Romeo and a Montague? 60 

Rom. Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike. 

Jul. How cam'st thou hither, tell me, and where- 
fore? . 
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, 



Act II. Sc. ii.] ROMEO AND JULIET. 85 

. And the place death, considering who thou art, 
65 If any of my kinsmen find thee here. 

Rom. With love's light wings did I o'erperch 
these walls; 
For stony limits cannot hold love out. 
And what love can do that dares love attempt ; 
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me. 
70 Jul. If they do see thee, they will murder thee. 
Bom. Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye 
Than twenty of their swords ! Look thou but sweet, 
And I am proof against their enmity. 

Jul. I would not for' the world they saw thee 
here. 
75 Bom. 1 have night's cloak to hide me from their 
eyes ; 
And but thou love me, let them find me here. 
My life were better ended by their hate, 
Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love. 

Jul. 'By whose direction found 'st thou out this 
place ? 
80 Bom. By Love, that first did prompt me to in- 
quire; 
He lent me counsel and I lent him eyes. 
I am no pilot ; yet, wert thou as far 
As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea, 
I should adventure for such merchandise. 
85 Jul. Thou know'st the mask of night is on my 
face. 
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek 
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night. 



Se EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. ii. 

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny 

What I have spoke ; but farewell compliment ! 

Dost thou love me ? I know thou wilt say ' ' Ay, ' ' 90 

And I will take thy word; yet, if thou swear 'st. 

Thou may'st prove false. At lovers' perjuries, 

They say, Jove laughs. gentle Romeo, 

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully ; 

Or if thou think 'st I am too quickly won, 95 

I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay, — 

So thou wilt woo ; but else, not for the world. 

In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond, 

And therefore thou mayst think my 'haviour light ; 

But trust me, gentleman, I '11 prove raore true 100 

Than those that have more cunning to be strange. 

I should have been more strange, I must confess, 

But that thou overheard 'st, ere I was ware, 

My true love 's passion ; therefore pardon me, 

And not impute this yielding to light love, 105 

Which the dark night hath so discovered. 

Rom. Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear 
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops — 

Jul. 0, swear not by the moon, the inconstant* 
moon. 
That monthly changes in her circled orb, 110 

Lest that thy love prove likewise variable. 

Rom. What shall I swear by ? 

Jul. Do not swear at all ; 

Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self. 
Which is the god of my idolatry, j 

And I'll believe thee. 115 



Act II. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 87 

115 Rom. If my heart's dear love — 

Jul. Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee, 
I have no joy of this contract to-night ; 
It is too rash, too unadvis 'd, too sudden, i 
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be 
120 Ere one can say it lightens. Sweet, good-night ! 
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath. 
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. 
Good-night, good-night ! as sweet repose and rest 
Come to thy heart as that wdthin my breast! 
125 Bom. 0, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied ? 

Jul. What satisfaction 'canst thou have to-night? 
Eom. The exchange of thy love's faithful vow 

for mine. 
Jul. I gave thee mine before thou didst request 
it; 
And yet I would it were to give again. 
130 Bom. Wouldst thou withdraw it ? For what pur- 
pose, love? 
Jul. But to be frank, and give it thee again. 
And yet I wish but for the thing I have. 
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 
My love as deep ; the more I give to thee, 
135 The more I have, for both are infinite. 

[Nurse] calls within. 
I hear some noise within;' dear love, adieu! 
Anon, good nurse ! Sweet Montague, be true. 
Stay but a little, I will come again. [Exit, above.] 
Bom. O blessed, blessed night ! I am afeard, 
140 Being in night, all this is but a dream, 



88 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. ii. 

Too flattering-sweet to be substantial. 
[Re-enter Juliet, above.'] 
Jul. Three words, dear Romeo, and good-night 
indeed. 
If that thy bent of love be honourable, 
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow, 
By one that I'll procure to come to thee, 145 

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite ; 
And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay 
And follow thee niy lord throughout the world. 
[Nurse.'] {Within.) Madam! 
Jul. I come, anon. — But if thou mean 'st not 
well, 150 

I do beseech thee — 

[Nurse.'] {'Within.) Madam! 
Jul. By and by, I come : — 

To cease thy suit, and leave me to my grief. 
To-morrow will I send. 
Bom. So thrive my soul — 

Jul. A thousand tim^s good-night! 155 

Exit [above.] 
Rom. A thousand times the worse, to want thy j 
light. 
Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their 

books, 
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks. 

[Retiring.] 
Re-enter Juliet, a'bove. 
Jul. Hist ! Romeo, hist ! 0, for a falconer's 
voice, 



■<! 



Act II. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 89 

160 To lure this tassel-gentle back again ! 

Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud ; 
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies, 
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than miiie. 
With repetition of my [Eomeo's name.] 
165 Romeo ! 

Bom. It is my soul, that calls upon my name. 
How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, 
. Like softest music to attending ears ! 
Jul. Eomeo ! 
Eo7n. My dear? 

Jul. What o'clock to-morrow 

Shall I send to thee ? 

Rom. By the hour of nine. 

170 Jul. I will not fail ; 'tis twenty year till then. 
I have forgot why I did call thee back. 

Eom. Let me stand here till thou remember it. 
Jul. I shall forget, to have thee still stand there, 
Rememb'ring how I love thy company. 
175 Rom. And I '11 still stay, to have thee still forget, 
Forgetting any other home but this. 

Jul. 'Tis almost morning, I would have thee 
gone ; — 
And yet no farther than a wanton 's bird ; 
That lets it hop a little from her hand, 
180 Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves. 
And with a silken thread plucks it back again, 
So loving- jealous of his liberty. 
Rom. I would I were thy bird. 
Jul. Sweet, so would I; 



90 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iii. 

Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. 
Good-night, good-night ! Parting is such sweet sor- 
row, 185 
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow. 

[Exit, above.] -1 
Rom. Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy 
breast ! 
Would I T^ere sleep and peace, so sweet to rest ! 
Hence will- 1 to my ghostly father's cell, 
His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell. 190 

Exi-f. 




Scene III. [Friar Laurence's celli] 

Enter Friar [Laurence] , with a basket. 

Fri. L. The gray-ey'd morn smiles on the frown- 
ing night, 
Chequ 'ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light, 
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels 
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels. 
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye, 5 

The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry, 
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours 
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers. 
The earth, that 's nature 's mother, is her tomb ; 
What is her burying grave, that is her womb ; 10 

And from her womb children of divers kind 
We sucking on her natural bosom find, 



Act II. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 91 

Many for many virtues excellent, 
■ None but for some, and yet all different. 

15 O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies 

In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities : 
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live 
But to the earth some special good doth give, 
Nor aught so good but, strain 'd from that fair use, 

20 Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. 
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied ; 
And vice sometime 's by action dignified. 

Enter Romeo. 
Within the infant rind of this weak flower 
Poison hath residence and medicine power; 

25 For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each 
part; 
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. 
Two such opposed kings encamp them still 
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will ; , 
And where the worser is predominant, 

30 Full soon the canker death eats up that plant. 
Eom. Good morrow, father. 
Fri. L. Benedicite! 

What early tongue so sweet saluteth me? 
Young son, it argues a distempered head 

35 So soon to bid good morrow to thy bed. 

Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye. 
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie ; 
But where unbruised youth with unstuff 'd brain 
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth 

reign ; 
Therefore thy earliness doth me assure 



92 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iii. 

Thou art up-rous 'd with some distemperature ; 40 

Or if not so, then here I hit it right, 
Our Romeo hath not been in bed to-night. 

Rom. That last is true ; the sweeter rest was mine. 

Fri. L, God pardon sin ! Wast thou with 
Rosaline ? 

Rom. With Rosaline, my ghostly father ? No ! 
I have forgot that name, and that name's woe. 45 

Fri. L. That's my good son; but where hast thou 
been, then? 

Rom,. I'll tell thee, ere thou ask it me again. 
I have been feasting with mine enemy, 
Where on a sudden one hath wounded me, 50 

That's by me wounded; both our remedies 
Within thy help and holy physic lies. 
1 bear no hatred, blessed man, for, lo, 
My intercession likewise steads my foe. 

Fri. 2y. Be plain, good son, and homely in thy 
drift; - 55 

Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift. 

Rom. Then plainly know my heart's dear love is 
set 
On the fair daughter of rich Capulet. 
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine ; 
And all combin'd, save what thou must combine 60 
By holy marriage. When and where and how 
We met, we wop'd, and made exchange of vow, 
I '11 tell thee as we pass ; but this I pray. 
That thou consent to marry us to-day. 



Act II. Sc. iii.] ROMEO AND JULIET. 93 

65 Fri. L. Holy Saint Francis, what a change is 
here ! 
Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear, 
So soon forsaken? Young men's love then lies 
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes, 
Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine 
70 Hath wash 'd thy sallow cheeks for Eosaline ! 
How much salt water thrown away in waste, 
To season love, that of it doth not taste ! 
The sun not yet thy sighs from heaven clears, 
Thy old groans yet ring in mine ancient ears ; 
75 Lo, here upon thy cheek the stain doth sit 
Of an old tear that is not wash'd off yet. 
If ere thou wast thyself and these woes thine. 
Thou and these woes were all for Rosaline. 
And art thou chang'd? Pronounce this sentence 
then: 
80 Women may fall, when there 's no strength in men. 
'Rom,. Thou chid'st me oft for loving Rosaline. 
¥t%. L. For doting, not for loving, pupil mine. 
Rom. And bad'st me bury love. 
Fri. L. Not in a grave, 

To lay one in, another out to have. 
85 Rom. I pray thee, chide me not. Her I love now 
Doth grace for grace and love for love allow ; 
The other did not so. 

Frn. L. 0, she knew well 

Thy love did read by rote that could not spell. 
But come, young waverer, come, go with me, 
90 In one respect I '11 thy assistant be ; 



94 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iv. 

For this alliance may so liappy prove, 

To turn your households' rancour to pure love. 

Rom. O, let us hence; I stand on sudden haste. 

Fri, L. Wisely and slow; they stumble that run 
fast. Exeunt. 



Scene IV. [A street.] 

Enter Benvolio and Mercutio. 

Jler. Where the devil should this Eomeo be? 
Cfcdme he not home to-night ? 

j!>en. Not to his father's; I spoke with his man. 

Mer. Ah, that same pale hard-hearted wench, 
that Rosaline, 
Torments him so, that he will sure run mad. 

Ben. Tybalt, the kinsman of old Capulet, 
Hath sent a letter to his father's house. 

Mer. A challenge, on my li:fe. 

Ben. Romeo will answer it. 

Mer. Any man that can write may answer a 
Ifitter. 10 

Ben. Nay, he will answer the. letter 's master, how 
he dares, being dared. 

Mer. Alas, poor Romeo ! he is already dead ; 
stabb 'd with a white wench 's black eye ; run 
through the ear with a love song ; the very pin of 15 
his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy 's butt-shaft : 
and is he a man to encounter Tybalt ? 



i 



Act II. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 95 

Ben, Why, what is Tybalt ? ■ 
Mer. More than prince of cats. 0, he's the cour- 
20 ageons captain of compliments. He fights as you 
sing prick-song; keeps time, distance, and propor- 
tion; he rests his minim rests, one, two, and the 
third in your bosom: the very butcher of a silk 
button; a duellist, a duellist; a gentleman of the 
25 YQVj first house, of the first and second cause. Ah, 
the immortal passado! the punto reverso! the hai! 
Ben. The what ? 

Mer. The pox of such^ antic, lisping, affecting 
f antasticoes ; these new tuners of accent! ''By 
30 Jesu, a very good blade ! a very tall man ! , . . " 
Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that 
we should be thu^ afflicted with these strange flies, 
these fashion-mongers, these perdona-mi's, who 
stand so much on the new form, that they cannot 
35 sit at ease on the old bench? 0, their bones, their 
bones ! 

Enter Romeo. ^ 

Ben. Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo. 

Mer. Without his roe, like a dried herring: O 

flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for 

40 the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his 

lady was a kitchen-wench, marry, she had a better 

love to be-rhyme her; Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra 

a gipsy; Helen and Hero hildings and harlots; 

Thisbe, a gray eye or so, but not to the purpose. 

45 Signior Romeo, honjour! There's a French salu- 



96 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iv. 

tation to your French slop. You gave us the coun- 
terfeit fairly last night. 

Bom. Good morrow to you both. What counter- 
feit did I give you? 

Mer. The slip, sir, the slip ; can you not conceive ? 50 

Bom. Pardon, good Mercutio, my business was 
great ; and in such a case as mine a man may strain 
courtesy. 

Mer. That's as much as to say, such a case as 
yours constrains a man to bow in the hams. 55 

Bom. Meaning to curtsy. 

Mer. Thou hast most kindly hit it. 

Bom. A most courteous exposition. 

Mer. Nay, I am the very pink of courtesy. 

Bom. Pink for flower. 60 

Mer. Right. 

Bom. Wliy, then is my pump well flower 'd. 

Mer. Sure wit ! Follow me this jest now till thou 
hast worn out thy pump, that, when the single sole 
of it is worn, the jest may remain, after the wear- 65 
ing, solely singular. 

Bom. single-sol'd jest, solely , singular for the 
singleness ! 

Mer. Come between us, good Benvolio; my wits 
faint. • 70 

Bom. Switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I'll 
cry a match. 

Mer. Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, 
I am done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in 
one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole 75 



Act II. Sc. iv.J EOMEO AND JULIET. 97 

five. Was I with you there for the goose ? 

Eom. Thou wast never with me for anything 
when thou wast not there for the goose. 

Mer. I will bite thee by the ear for that jest. 
80 Eom. Nay, good goose, bite not. 

Mer. Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a 
most sharp sauce. 

Bom. And ii it not, then, well serv'd in to a^ 
sweet goose ? 
85 Mer. O, here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches 
from an inch narrow to an ell broad ! 

Eom. I stretch it out for that word ''broad"; 
Avhicli added to the goose, proves thee far and wide 
a broad goose. 
90 Mer. Why, is not this better now than groaning 
for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou 
Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well 
as by nature ; for this drivelling love is like a great 
natural. ... , 

95 Ben. Stop there, stop there. . . . 

Eom. Here's goodly gear! 

Enter Nurse and her man [Peter]. 

A sail, a sail ! 

Mer. Two, two; a shirt and a smock. 

Nurse. Peter! 
100 Peter. Anon! 

Nurse. My fan, Peter. 

Mer. Good Peter, to hide her face; for her fan's 
the fairer face. 

Nurse. God ye good morrow, gentlemen. 



93 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iv. 

Mer. God ye good den, fair gentlewoman. 105 

Nurse, Is it good den ? 
Mer. 'Tis no less, I tell ye. ... 
Nurse. Out upon you ! what a man are you ! 
Rom. One, gentlewoman, that God hath made for 
himself to mar. 110 

Nurse. By my troth, it is well said ; ' ' for himself 
to mar," quoth 'a ! Gentlemen, can any of yoii tell 
me .where I may find the young Romeo ? 

Rom. I can tell you ; but young Romeo will be 
older when you have found him than he was when 115 
you sought him. I am the youngest of that name, 
for fault of a worse. 
Nurse. You say well. 

Mer. Yea, is the worst well? Very well took, i' 
faith; wisely, wisely. 120 

Nurse. If you be he, sir, I desire some confidence 
with you. 

Ben. She will indite him to some supper. 
Mer. ... So ho ! 

Bom. What hast thou found? 125 

Mer. No hare, sir ; unless a hare, sir, in a lenten 
pie, that is something stale and hoar ere it be spent. 

[Sings.'] 
' ' An old hare hoar, 
- And an old hare hoar. 
Is very good meat in lent ; 130 

But a hare that is hoar 
• Is too much for a score. 
When it hoars ere it be spent. ' ' 



Act II. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 99 

Romeo, will you come to your father's? We'll to 
135 dinner thither. 

Rom. I will follow, you. 

Mer. Farewell, ancient lady; farewell, [singing] 
"lady, lady, lady." 

[Exeunt Mercutio and Benvolio.'] 
Nurse. I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was 
140 this, that was so full of his ropery ? 

Eom. A gentleman, nurse, that loves to hear him- 
self talk, and will speak more in a minute than he 
will stand to in a month. 

Nurse. An 'a speak anything against me, I'll 
145 take him down, an 'a were lustier than he is, and 
twenty such Jacks; and if I cannot, I'll find those 
that shall. Scurvy knave ! I am none of his flirt- 
gills; I am none of his skains-mates. — And thou 
must stand by too, and suffer every knave to use 
150 me at his pleasure ? 

Peter. I saw no man use you at his pleasure; if 

I had, my weapon should quickly have been out. I 

warrant you, I dare draw as soon as another man, 

if I see occasion in a good quarrel, and the law on 

155 my side. 

Nurse. Now, afore God, I am so vex'd, that every 
part about me quivers. Scurvy knave ! Pray you, 
sir, a word : and as I told you, my young lady bid 
me inquire you out; what she bid me say, I will 
160 keep to myself. But first let me tell ye, if ye should 
lead her into a fool's paradise, as they say, it 
were a very gross kind of behaviour, as they say; 



100 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. iv. 

for the gentlewoman is yonng, and, therefore, if 
you should deal double with her, truly it were an ill 
thing to be off 'red to any gentlewoman, and very 165 
weak dealing. 

Rom. Nurse, commend me to thy lady and mis- 
tress. I protest unto thee — 

Nurse. Good heart, and, i' faith, I will tell her as 
much. Lord, Lord, she will be a joyful woman. 170 

Eom. "What wilt thou tell her, nurse ? Thou 
dost not mark me. 

Nurse. I will tell her, sir, that you do protest; 
which, as I take it, is a gentlemanlike offer. 

Eom. Bid her devise 175 

Some means to come to shrift this afternoon; 
And there she shall at Friar Laurence' cell 
Be shriv'd and married. Here is for thy pains. 

Nurse. No, truly, sir ; not a penny. 

Rom. Go to ; I say you shall. 180 

Nurse. This afternoon, si:^? Well, she shall be 
there. 

Rom. And stay, good nurse; — behind the abbey 
wall 
Within this hour ray man shall be with thee, 
And bring thee cords made like a tackled stair ; 
Which to the high top-gallant of my joy 185 

Must be my convoy in the secret night. 
Farewell ; be trusty, and I '11 quit thy pains. 
Farewell ; commend me to thy mistress. 

Nurse. Now God in heaven bless thee! Hark 
you, sir. 



Act II. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JUI.IET. 101 

190 Rom. What say'st thou, my dear nurse? 

Nurse. Is your man secret? Did you ne'er hear 
say, 
' ' Two may keep counsel, putting one away ' ' f 
Bom. I warrant thee, my man's as true as 

steel. 

Nurse. Well, sir; my mistress is the sweetest 

195 lady — Lord, Lord! when 'twas a little prating 

thing, — 0," there is a nobleman in town, one Paris, 

that would fain lay knife aboard; but she, 'good 

soul, had as lief see a toad, a very toad, as see 

him. I anger her sometimes and tell her that Paris 

200 is the properer man ; but, I '11 warrant you, when I 

say so, she looks as pale as any clout in the versal 

world. Doth not rosemary and Romeo begin both 

with a letter ? 

s 

Rom. Ay, nurse ; what of that ? Both with an R. 
205 Nurse. Ah, mocker! that's the dog's name. R is 
for the — No; I know it begins with some other 
letter — and she hath the prettiest sententious of it, 
of you and rosemary, that it would do you good to 
hear it. 
210 Rom. Commend me to thy lady. 

Nurse. Ay, a thousand times. [Exit Romeo.] 
Peter! 

Pet. Anon! 

Nurse. Before, and apace. [Exeunt, 



102 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. v. 

Scene Y. [Capulet's orchard.] 

Enter Juliet. 

Jul. The clock struck nine when I did send the 
nurse ; ^ 
In half an hour she promis 'd to return. 
Perchance she cannot meet him: that's not so. 
O, she is lame ! Love 's heralds should be thoughts, 
Which ten times faster glide than the sun 's beams, 5 
Driving back shadows over louring hills ; 
Therefore do nimble-pinion 'd doves draw Love, 
And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings. 
Now is the sun upon the highmost hill 
Of this day's journey, and from nine till twelve lo 
Is three long hours, yet she is not come. 
Had she affections and warm youthful blood. 
She would be as swift in motion as a ball ; 
My words would bandy her to my sweet love, 
And his to me ; ■ 15 

But old folks,. marry, feign as they were dead; 
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead. 
Enter Nurse [and Peter]. 
0' God, she comes ! honey nurse, what news ? 
Hast thou met with him ? Send thy man away. 

Nurse. Peter, stay at the gate. 20 

[Exit Peter.] 

Jul. Now, good sweet nurse, — Lord, why 
look'st thou sad? 



Act II. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 103 

Though news be sad, yet tell them merrily ; 
If good, thou sham'st the music of sweet news 
By playing it to me with so sour a face. 
25 Nurse. I am a-weary, give me leave a while. 
Fie, how my bones ache ! What a jaunce have I 
had! 
Jul. I would thou hadst my bones, and I thy 
news. 
Nay, come, I pray thee, speak; good, good nurse^ 
speak. 
Nurse. Jesu, what haste ! Can you not stay a 
while ? 
30 Do you not see that I am out of breath ? 

Jul. How art thou out of breath, when thou hast 
breath 
To say to me that thou art out of breath ? 
The excuse that thou dost make in this delay 
Is longer than the tale thou dost excuse. 
35 Is thy news good, or bad ? Answer to that ; 
Say either, and 1 11 stay the circumstance. 
Let me be satisfied, is 't good or bad ? 

Nurse. Well, you have made a simple choice ; you 
know not how to choose a man. Romeo ! no, not he ; 
40 though his face be better than any man's, yet his 
leg excels all men's; and for a hand, and a foot, 
and a body, though they be not to be talk 'd on, yet 
they are past compare. He is not the flower of 
courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb. 
45 Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you 
din 'd at home ? 

Jul. No, No! But all this did I know before. 
What says he of our marriage ? What of that ? 



104 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IL Sc. v. 

Nurse. Lord, how my head aches ! Wliat a head 
have I! 
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces. 
My back o' t' other side, — 0, my back, my back! 
Beshrew your heart for sending me about 
To catch my death with jauncing up and down ! 

Jul. I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well. 
Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my 5I 
love? 

Nurse. Your love says, like an honest gentleman, 
and a courteous, and a kind, and a handsome, and, 
I warrant, a virtuous, — Where is your mother? 

Jul. Where is my mother ! why, she is within ; 
Where should she be ? How oddly thou repliest ! 60 
"Your love says, like an honest gentleman, 
' Where is your mother ? ' " 

Nurse. O God's lady dear! 

Are you so hot ? Marry, come up, I trow ; 
Is this the poultice for my aching bones ? 
Henceforward do your messages yourself. 65 

Jul. Here's such a coil! — Come, what says 
Romeo ? 

Nurse. Have you got leave to go to shrift to-day ? 

Jul. I have. 
N Nurse. Then hie you hence to Friar Laurence' 

cell; 
There stays a husband to make you a wife. 70 

Now comes the wanton blood up in your cheeks, 
They'll be in scarlet straight at any news. 
Hie you to church ; I must another way, 



Act II. Sc. vi.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 105 

To fetch a ladder, by the which your love 
75 Must climb a bird's nest soon when it is dark. 
I am the drudge and toil in your delight. . . . 
Go ; I '11 to dinner ; hie you to the cell. 
Jul. Hie to high fortune ! Honest nurse, fare- 
well. Exeunt. 



Scene VI. [Friar Laurence's cell.] 

Enter Friar Laurence and Romeo. 

Fri. L. So smile the heavens upon this holy act, 
That after hours with sorrow chide us not ! 

Rom. Amen, amen ! but come what sorrow can, 
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy 
5 That one short minute gives me in her sight. 
Do thou but close our hands with holy words, 
Then love-devouring Death do what he dare ; 
It is enough I may but call her mine. 

Fri. L. These violent delights have violent ends, 
10 And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, 
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey 
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness 
And in the taste confounds the appetite ; 
Therefore love moderately ; long love doth so ; 
15 Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. ^ 

Enter Juliet. 
Here comes the lady. 0, so light a foot 
"Will ne 'er wear out the everlasting flint. 



106 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act II. Sc. vL 

A lover may bestride the gossamer 

That idles in the wanton summer air, 

And yet not fall ; so light is vanity. 20 

Jul. Good even to my ghostly confessor. 

Fri. L. Eomeo shall thank thee, daughter, for 
ns both. 

Jul. As much to him, else is his thanks too much. 

Fom. Ah, Juliet, if the measure of thy joy 
Be heap 'd like mine and that thy skill be more 25 

To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath 
This neighbour air, and let rich music's tongue 
Unfold the imagin'd happiness that both 
Receive in either by this dear encounter. 

Jul. Conceit, more rich in matter than in words, SO 
Brags of his substance, not of ornament. 
They are but beggars that can count their worth -^ 
But my true love is grown to such excess 
I cannot sujn up sum of half my wealth. 

Fri. L. Come, come with me, and we will make 35 
short work ; 
For, by your leaves, you shall not stay alone 
Till Holy Church incorporate two in one. Exeunt, 



ACT III 

Scene I. [A public place.] 

Enter i\lERCUTio, Benvolio, and men. 

Ben. I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire. 
The day'is hot, the Capulets abroad, 
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl, 
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring. 
5 Mer. Thou art like one of these fellows that, 
when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me 
his SAvord npon the table and says, ''God send me 
no need of thee ! ' ' and by the operation of the sec- 
ond cnp draws him on the drawer, when indeed 
10 there is no need. 

Ben. Am I like such a fellow? 

Mer. Come, come, thou art as hot a Jack in thy 
mood as any in Italy, and as soon moved to be 
moody, and as soon moody to be moved. 
15 5e?^. And what to ? 

Mer. Nay, an there were two such, we should 
have none shortly, for one would kill the other. 
Thou ! why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath 
a hair more, or a hair less, in his beard, than thou 
20 hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a m.an for cracking 
nuts, having no other reason but because thou 
hast hazel eyes. What eye but such an eye would 

107 



108 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. i. 

spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of 
quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head 
hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling. 25 
Thou hast quarrell'd with a man for coughing 
in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog that 
hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall 
out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before 
Easter ? with another, for tying his new shoes with 30 
old riband ? And yet thou wilt tutor me for quar- 
relling ! 

Ben. An I were so apt to quarrel as thou art, any 
man should buy the fee-simple of my life for an 
^hour and a quarter. ^ , 35 

Mer. The fee-simple ! simple ! 

Enter Tybalt, Petruchio, and others. 

Ben. By my head, here comes the Capulets. 

Mer. By my heel, I care not. 

Ty}), Follow me close, for I will speak to them. 
Gentlemen, good den ; a word with one of you. 40 

Mer. And but one word with one of us ? Couple 
it with something ; make it a word and a blow. 

Tyh. You shall find me apt enough to that, sir, 
an you will give occasion. 

Mer. Could you not take some occasion without 45 
giving ? 

Tyh. Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo, — 

Mer. Consort! what, dost thou make us min- 
strels? An thou make minstrels of us, look to hear 
nothing but discords. Here's my fiddle-stick ; here's 50 
that shall make you dance. 'Zounds, consort ! 



Act III. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 109 

Ben. We talk here in the public haunt of men. 
Either withdraw unto some private place, 
Or reason coldly of your grievances, 
55 Or else depart ; here all eyes gaze on us. 

Mer. Men's eyes were made to look, and let them 
gaze; 
I will not budge for no man 's pleasure, I. 
Enter Romeo. 
Tyl). "Well, peace be with you, sir; here comes 

my man. 
Mer. But I'll be hang'd, sir, if he w^ear your 
livery. 
60 Marry, go before to field, he'll be your follower; 
Your worship in that sense may call him ' ' man. ' ' 

Tylj. Romeo, the love I bear thee can afford 
No better term than this : thou art a villain. 

Eoni. Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee 
65 Doth much excuse the appertaining rage 
To such a greeting. Villain am I none ; 
Therefore farewell ; I see thou know 'st me not. 
Tyh. Boy, this shall not excuse the injuries 
That thou hast done me ; therefore turn and draw. 
70 Eom. I do protest, I never injured thee, 
But love thee better than thou canst devise 
Till thou shalt know the reason of my love ; 
And so, good Capulet, — which name I tender 
As dearly as mine own, — be satisfied. 
75 Mer. calm, dishonourable, vile submission! 

Alia stoccata carries it away. [Draws.] 

^ Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk? 



110 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. So. i. 

Tylj. What wouldst thou have with me? 

Mer. Good king of cats, nothing but one of your 
nine lives ; that I mean to make bold withal, and, 8( 
as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of 
the eight. Will you pluck your sword out of his 
pilcher by the ears ? Make haste, lest mine be about 
your ears ere it be out. 

Tyh. I am for you. [Drawing.'] 8i 

Uom. Gentle Mercutio, put thy rapier up. 

WIer. Come, sir, your passado. [They fight] 

Bom. Draw, Benvolio ; beat down their weapons. 
Gentlemen, for shame, forbear this outrage ! 
Tybalt, Mercutio, the Prince expressly hath 9( 

Porbid this bandying in Verona streets. 
Hold, Tybalt! Good Mercutio! 
Tybalt under Romeo's arm thrusts Mercutio, and 

flies. 

Mer. I am hurt. 

A plague o ' both your houses ! I am sped. 
Is he gone, and hath nothing ? 

^en. What, art thou hurt ? 

Mer. Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, 'tis 
enough. ' 95 

Where is my page ? Go, villain, fetch a surgeon. 

[Exit Page.] 

Rom. Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much. 

Mer. No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as 
a church-door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Ask 
for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a 100 
grave man. I am pepper 'd, I warrant, for this 



Act hi. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. HI 

world. A plague o ' both your houses ! 'Zounds, a 
dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to 
death ! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by 
105 the book of arithmetic ! Why the devil came you 
between us ? I was hurt under your arm. 
Rom. I thought all for the best. 
Mer. Help me into some house, Benvolio, 
Or I shall faint. A plague o' both your houses! 
110 They have made worms' meat of me. I have it, 
And soundly too. Your houses ! 

Exeunt [Mercutio and Benvolio]. 
Rom. This gentleman/ the Prince's near ally, 
My very friend, hath got his mortal hurt 
In my behalf; my reputation stain 'd 
115 With Tybalt's slander, — Tybalt, that an hour 
Hath been my cousin ! sweet Juliet, 
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate 
And in my temper soft 'ned valour 's steel ! 
Re-enter Benvolio. 
Ben. Romeo, Romeo, brave Mercutio 's dead I 
120 That gallant spirit hath aspir'd the clouds, 
Which too untimely here did scorn the earth. 
Rom. This day's black fate on moe days doth 
depend ; 
This but begins the woe others must enij. 
Ben. Here comes the furious Tybalt back again. 
Re-enter Tybalt. 
125 Rom. Alive, in triumph! and Mercutio slain! 
Away to heaven, respective lenity. 
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now ! 



112 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. i. 

Now, Tybalt, take the "villain" back again, 

That late thou gav'st me; for Mereutio 's soul 

Is but a little way above our heads, 130 

Staying for thine to keep him company. 

Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him. 

Tyh. Thou, wretched boy, that didst consort him 
here, 
Shalt with him hence. 

Bom. This shall determine that. 

They fight; Tybalt falls. 

Ben. Romeo, away, be gone! 135 

The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain. 
Stand not amaz 'd ; the Prince will doom thee death 
If thou art taken. Hence, be gone, away! 

Bom. 0, I am fortune's fool! 

Ben. ^ Why dost thou stay? 

Exit Borneo. 

Enter Citizens. 
1. at. Which way ran he that kill'd Mereutio? 140 
Tybalt, that murderer, which way ran he ? 
_gf^ There lies that Tybalt. 
1. at. Up, sir, go with me ; 

I charge thee in the Prince's name, obey. 

Enter Prince, Montague, Capulet, their Wives. 

and all. 

Prin. Where are the vile beginners of this fray ? 

Ben. noble Prince, I can discover all 145 

The unlucky manage of this fatal brawl. 
There lies the man, slain by young Romeo, 



Act III. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 113 

That slew thy kinsman, brave Mercutio. 

La. Cap. Tybalt, my cousin! my brother's 
child! 

150 O Prince ! cousin ! husband ! 0, the blood is spilt 
Of my dear kinsman ! Prince, as thou art true, 
For blood of ours, shed blood of Montague. 
cousin, cousin ! 

Prin. Benvolio, who began this bloody fray ? 

155 Ben. Tybalt, here slain, whom Romeo's hand did 
^ slay ! 
Eomeo that spoke him fair, bid him bethink 
How nice the quarrel was, and urg'd withal 
Tour high displeasure; all this uttered 
AYith gentle breath, calm look, knees humbly bow'd, 

160 Could not take truce with the unruly spleen 
Of Tybalt deaf to peace, but that he tilts 
With piercing steel at bold Mercutio 's breast, 
Who, all as hot, turns deadly point to point, 
And, with a martial scorn, with one hand beats 

165 Cold death aside, and with the other sends 
It back to Tybalt, whose dexterity 
Retorts it. Romeo he cries aloud, 
''Hold, friends! friends, part!" and, swifter than 

his tongue. 
His agile arm beats down' their fatal points, 

170 And 'twixt them rushes ; underneath whose arm 
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life 
Of stout Mercutio, and then Tybalt fled ; 
But by and by comes back to Romeo, 
Who had but newly entertain 'd revenge, 



114 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. i. 

And to 't they go like lightning, for, ere I 175 

Could draw to part them, was stout Tybalt slain, 
And, as he fell, did E^omeo turn and fly. 
This is the truth, or let Benvolio die. 

La. Cap. He is a kinsman to the Montague; 
Affection makes him false ; he speaks not true. 180 

Some twenty of them fought in this black strife. 
And all those twenty could but kill one life. 
I beg for justice, which thou. Prince, must give ; 
Romeo slew Tybalt, Romeo must not live. 

Prin. Romeo slew him, he slew Mercutio; 185 

"Who now the price of his dear blood doth owe ? 

Mon. Not Romeo, Prince, he was Mercutio 's 
friend ; 
His fault concludes but what the law should end, 
The life of Tybalt. 

Prin. And for that offense 

Immediately we do exile him hence. 190 

I have an interest in your hate's proceeding, 
My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding ; 
But 1 11 amerce you with so strong a fine 
That you shall all repent the loss of mine. 
I will be deaf to pleading and excuses; 195' 

Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out abuses ; 
Therefore use none. Let Romeo hence in haste, 
Else, when he's found, that hour is his last. 
Bear hence this body and attend our will. 
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill. 200 

Exeunt. 



AriT III. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 115 



Scene II. [Capulet's orchard.] 

Enter Juliet, alone. 

Jul. Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, 
Towards Phoebus ' lodging ; such a wagoner 
As Phaethon would whip you to the west, 
And bring in cloudy night immediately. 
5 Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night. 
That runaway's eyes may wink; and, Romeo, 
Leap to these arms ! Untalk 'd of and unseen 
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites. 
And by their own beauties ; or, if love be blind, 

10 It best agrees with night. Come, civil night, 
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black, ... 
Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks, 
With thy black mantle ; till strange love grow bold. 
Think true love acted, simple modesty. 

IS Come, night ; come, Romeo ; come, thou day in 
night; 
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of -night, 
Y/hiter than new snow on a raven's back. 
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow 'd 

night. 
Give me my Romeo ; and, when he shall die, 

20 Take him and cut him out in little stars. 
And he will make the face of heaven so fine 
That all the world will be in love with night, 
And pay no worship to the garish sun. 



116 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. ii. 

0, I have bought the mansion of a love, 

But not possess 'd it, and, though I am sold, 25 

Not yet enjoy 'd. So tedious is this day 

As is the night before some festival 

To an impatient child that hath new robes 

And may not wear them. 0, here comes my nurse, 

Enter Nurse, with cords. 

And she brings news ; and every tongue that speaks 30 
But Eomeo's name speaks heavenly eloquence. 
Now, nurse, what news? What hast thou there? 

The cords 
That Romeo bid thee fetch ? 

Nurse. Ay, ay, the cords. 

[Throws them down.] 
Jul. Ay me ! what news ? Why dost thou wring 

thy hands? 
Nurse. Ah, well-a-day ! he 's dead, he 's dead, he 's 
dead! 35 

We are undone, lady, we are undone ! 
Alack the day ! he 's gone, he 's kill 'd, he 's dead ! 
Jid. Can heaven be so envious ? 
Nurse. Romeo can, 

Though heaven cannot. Romeo, Romeo ! 
Who ever would have thought it ? Romeo ! 40 

J id. What devil art thou, that dost torment me 
thus? 
This torture should be roar'd in dismal hell. 
Hath Romeo slain himself ? Say thou but ay. 
And that bare vowel / shall poison more 



ACT III. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 117 

45 Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. 
I am not I, if there be such an ay ; 
Or tho£3 eyes shut, that makes thee answer ay. 
If he be slain, say ay; or if not, no. 
Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe. 
50 Nurse. I saw the wound, I saw it with mine 
eyes,— 
God save the mark ! — here on his manly breast. 
A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse ! 
Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaub 'd in blood. 
All in gore-blood ; I swounded at the sight. 
55 Jul. 0, break, my heart ! poor bankrupt, break 
at once! 
To prison, eyes, ne 'er look on liberty ! 
Vile earth, to earth resign ; end motion here ; 
And thou and Romeo press one heavy bier ! 

Nurse. O Tybalt, Tybalt, the best friend I had ! 
60 courteous Tybalt ! honest gentleman ! 
That ever I should live to see thee dead ! 

Jul. What storm is this that blows so contrary f 
Is Romeo slaught 'red, and is Tybalt dead ? 
My dearest cousin, and my dearer lord? 
65 Then, dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom ! 
For who is living, if those two are 'gone? 

Nurse. Tybalt is gone, and Romeo banished; 
Romeo that kill'd him, he is banished. 

Jul. God! did Romeo's hand shed Tybalt's 
blood? 
70 Nurse. It did, it did ; alas the day, it did ! 

Jul. serpent heart, hid with a flow 'ring face! 



118 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. ii. 

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave ? 

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! 

Dove-feather 'd raven! wolvish ravenous lamb! 

Despised substance of divinest show! 75 

Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st, 

A damned saint, an honourable villain ! 

O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell, 

When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend 

In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh? 80 

Was ever book containing such vile matter 

So fairly bound ? 0, that deceit should dwell 

In such a gorgeous palace ! 

Nurse. There's no trust, 

No faith, no honesty in men; all perjur'd. 
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers. 85 

Ah, where 's my man ? Give me some aqua vitce; 
These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old. 
Shame come to Romeo ! 

Jul. Blister 'd be thy tongue 

For such a wish ! he was not born to shame. 
Upon his brow shame is asham'd to sit; 90 

For 'tis a throne where honour may be crown 'd 
Sole monarch of the universal earth. 
O, what a beast was I to chide at him ! 

Nurse. Will you speak well of him that kill'd 
your cousin? 

Jul. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband ? 95 
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy 

name, 
When I, thy three-hours' wife, have mangled it? 



Act III. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 119 

, But, wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin? 
That villain cousin would have kill'd my husband. 

100 Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring ; 
Your tributary drops belong to woe, 
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy. 
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain ; 
And Tybalt's dead, that would have slain my hus- 
band. 

105 All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then? 

Some word there was, worser than Tybalt's death, 

That murd 'red me ; I would forget it fain ; 

But, 0, it presses to my memory 

Like damned guilty deeds to sinners \minds : 

110 "Tybalt is dead, and Romeo — ^banished." 
That "banished," that one word "banished," 
Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death 
Was woe enough, if it had ended there ; "^ 

Or, if sour woe delights in fellowship 

115 And needly will be rank'd with other griefs. 

Why follow 'd not, when she said, "Tybalt's dead," 
Thy father, or thy mother, nay, or both. 
Which modern lamentation might have mov 'd ? 
But with a rear-ward following Tybalt's death, 

120 ' * Romeo is banished, ' ' to speak that word. 
Is father, mother, Tybalt, Eomeo, Juliet, 
All slain, all dead. "Eomeo is banished!" 
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound. 
In that word 's death ; no words can that woe sound. 

125 Where is my father and my mother, nurse ? 

Nurse. Weeping and wailing over Tybalt's corse. 



120 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. iii. 

Will you go to them? I will bring you thither. 

Jul. Wash they his wounds with tears? Mine 
shall be spent, 
When theirs are dry, for Komeo's banishment. 
Take up those cords. Poor ropes, you are beguil'd, 130 
Both you and I, for Romeo is exil'd. 
He made you for a highway to my bed, 
But I, a maid, die maiden-widowed. . . . 

Nurse. Hie to your chamber. I'll find Romeo 
To comfort you ; I wot well where he is. 135 

Hark ye, your Romeo will be here at night. 
I '11 to him ; he is hid at Laurence ' cell. 

Jul. 0, find him ! Give this ring to my true 
knight, 
.And bid him come to take his last farewell. 

Exeunt. 



Scene III. [Friar Laurence's cell.] 

Enter Friar [Laurence], Romeo [following']. 

Fri. L. Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou 
fearful man : 
Affliction is enamour 'd of thy parts, 
And thou art wedded to calamity. 

Bom. Father, what news? What is the Prince's 
doom ? 
What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand, 5 



Act III. Sc. iii.] KOMEO AND JULIET. 121 

That I yet know not ? 

Fri. L. Too familiar 

Is my dear son with such sour company. 
I bring thee tidings of the Prince's doom. 

Rom. "What less thai| dooms-day is the Prince's 
doom ? 
10 Fri. L. A gentler judgment vanish 'd from his 
lips, 
Not body's death, but body's banishment. 

Bom. Ha^ banishment ! Be merciful, say death ; 
For exile hath more terror in his look, 
Much more than death. Do not say banishment ! 
15 Fri. L. Here from Verona art thou banished. 
Be patient, for the world is broad and wide. 

Rom. There is no world without Verona walls. 
But purgatory, torture, hell itself. 
Hence banished is banish 'd from the world, 
20 And world 's exile is death ; then ' ' banished ' ' 
Is death mis-term 'd. Calling death ''banishment," 
Thou cut'st my head off with a golden axe. 
And smil'st upon the stroke that murders me. 
Fri. L. deadly sin ! O rude unthankfulness ! 
25 Thy fault our law calls death ; but the kind Prince, 
' Taking thy part, hath rush 'd aside the law. 
And turn'd that black word death to banishment. 
This is dear mercy, and thou seest it not. 

Rom. 'Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is 
here, 
30 Where Juliet lives ; and every cat and dog 
And little mouse, every unworthy thing, 



222 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. iiL 

Live here in heaven and may look on her; 

But liomeo may not. More validity, 

More honourable state, more courtship lives 

In earrion-flies than Romeo ; they may seize 35 

On the v^^iite wonder of dear Juliet's hand 

And steal immortal blessing from her lips, 

Wlio, even in pure and vestal modesty, 

StiU blush, as thinking their own kisses sin; 

But Romeo may not ; he is banished. 40 

This may flies do, when I from this must fly ; 

They are free men, but I am banished : 

And say'st thou yet that exile is not death? 

Hadst thou no poison mix'd, no sharp-ground knife, 

No sudden mean of death, though ne 'er so mean, 45 

But '' banished" to kill me?— "Banished"? 

O friar, the damned use that word in hell ; 

Howlings attend it. How hast thou the heart. 

Being a divine, a ghostly confessor, 

A sin-absolver, and my friend profess 'd, 50 

To mangle me with that word "banished"? 

Fri. L. Thou fond mad man, hear me a little 
speak. 

Rom. 0, thou wilt speak again of banishment. 

-Fri. L. I'll give thee armour to keep off that 
word ; 
Adversity 's sweet milk, philosophy, 55 

To com>fort thee, though thou art banished. 

Rom. Yet "banished"? Hang up philosophy! 
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, 
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, 



ACT III. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 123 

60 It helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more. 

Fri. L. 0, then I see that madmen have no ears. 
Rom. How should they, when that wise men have 

no eyes? 
Fri. L. Let me dispute with thee of thy estate. 
Bom. Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not 
feel. 
65 Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love, 
An hour but married, Tybalt murdered, 
Doting like me and like me banished. 
Then might 'st thou speak, then might 'st thou tear 

thy hair, 
And fall upon the ground, as I do now, 
70 Taking the measure of an unmade grave. 

Knocking ivithin. 
Fri. L. Arise; one knocks. Good Eojneo, hide 

thyself. 
Bom. Not I; unless the breath of heart-sick 
groans. 
Mist-like, infold me from the search of eyes. 

Knocking. 
Fri. L. Hark, how they knock! Who's there? 
Romeo, arise; 
75 Thou wilt be taken. — Stay a while !— Stand up ; 

Knocking 
Run to my study. — By and by ! — God 's will. 
What simpleness is this ! — I come, I come ! 

Knocking 
Who knocks so hard ? Whence come you ? What 's 
your will? 



124 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. iii. 

Filter Nurse. 

Nurse. Let me come in, and you shall know my 
errand. 
I come from Lady Juliet. 

Fri. L. Welcome, then. 80 

Nurse. holy friar, 0, tell me, holy friar, 
Where is my lady 's lord, where 's Romeo ? 

Fri. L. There on the ground, with his own tears 
made drunk. 

Nurse. 0, he is even in my mistress' case, 
Uust in her case ! O woeful sympathy ! .• 85 

Piteous predicament ! Even so lies she, 
Blubb'ring and weeping, weeping and blubb'ring. 
Stand up, stand up ; stand, an you be a man. 
For Juliet's sake, for her sake, rise and stand. 
Why should you fall into so deep an ? 90 

Rom. Nurse ! 

Nurse. Ah, sir! ah, sir! Death's the end of all. 

Bom. Spak'st thou of Juliet? How it is with 
her? 
Doth she not think me an old murderer, 
Now I have stain 'd the childhood of our joy 95 

With blood remov'd but little from her own? 
Where is she ? and how doth she ? and what says 
My conceal'd lady to our cancell'd love? 

Nurse. 0, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and 
weeps ; 
And now falls on her bed ; and then starts up, 100 

And Tybalt calls; and then on Romeo cries, 
And then down falls again. 



Act III. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 125 

Bom. As if that name, 

Shot from the deadly level of a gun, 

Did murder her, as that name's cursed hand 
105 Murder 'd her kinsman. 0, tell me, friar, tell me, 

In what vile part of this anatomy 

Doth my name lodge ? Tell me, that I may sack 

The hateful mansion. 

He offers to stab himself, and the Nurse 
snatches the dagger away. 
Fri. L. Hold thy desperate hand! 

Art thou a man ? Th}^ form cries out thou art ; 
110 Thy tears are womanish ; thy wild acts denote 

The unreasonable fury of a beast. 

Unseemly woman in a seeming man, 

And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both, 

Thou hast amaz 'd me ! By my holy order, 
115 1 thought thy disposition better temper 'd. 

Hast thou slain Tybalt? Wilt thou slay thyself, 

And slay thy lady that in thy life lives. 

By doing damned hate upon thyself? 

Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and 
earth? 
120 Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do 
meet 

In thee at once, which thou at once wouldst lose. 

Fie, fie, thou sham'st thy shape, thy love, thy wit; 

Which, like a usurer, abound 'st in all, 

And uses none in that true use indeed 
125 Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit. 

Thy noble shape is but a form of wax. 



126 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. iii. 

Digressing from the valour of a man ; 
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury, 
Killing that love which thou hast vow 'd to cherish ; 
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love, 130 

Mis-shapen in the conduct of them both, 
Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask, 
Is set a-fire, by thine own ignorance, ^ 

And thou dismemb'red with thine own defence. 
What, rouse thee, man ! thy Juliet is alive, 135 J 

For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead : 
There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee, 
But thou slewest Tybalt : there art thou happy. 
The law that threat 'ned death becomes thy friend 
And turns it to exile : there art thou happy. 140 

A pack of blessings light upon thy back ; 
' Happiness courts thee in his best array ; 
But, like a misbehav'd and sullen wench. 
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love. 
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. 145 

Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed ; 
Ascend her chamber ; hence ! and comfort her. 
But look thou stay not till the watch be set, 
For then thou canst not pass to Mantua, 
Where thou shalt live till we can find a time 150 

To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, 
Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back 
With twenty hundred thousand times more joy 
Than thou went'st forth in lamentation. 
Go before, nurse ; commend me to thy lady ; 155 

And bid her hasten all the house to bed, 



Act III. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 127 

"Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto. 
Romeo is coming. 

Nurse. Lord, I could have stay'd here all the 
night 
160 To hear good counsel. 0, what learning is! 
My lord, I'll tell my lady you will come. 

Bom. Do so, and bid my sweet prepare to chide. 
Nurse offers to go in, and turns again. 
Nurse. Here, sir, a ring she bid me give you, sir. 
Hie you, make haste, for it grows very late. 
165 Bom. How well my comfort is reviv 'd by this ! 

Exit Nurse. 
Fri. L. Gro hence; good-night; and here stands 
all your state : 
Either be gone before the watch be set, 
Or by the break of day disguis'd from hence. 
Sojourn in Mantua ; I '11 find out your man, 
170 And he shall signify from time to time 
Every good hap to you that chances here. 
Give me thy hand ; 'tis late. Farewell ; good-night. 
Bom. But that a joy past joy calls out on me, , 
It were a grief, so brief to part with thee. 
175 Farewell. Exeunt. 

Scene IV. [A room in Capulet's house.] 

Enter Capulet, Lady Capulet, and Paris. 

Cap. Things have fallen out, sir, so unluckily 
That we have had no time to move our daughter. 



128 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. iv. 

Look you, she lov'd her kinsman Tybalt dearly, 
And so did I. Well, we were born to die. 
'Tis very late, she '11 not come down to-night ; 
I promise you, but for your company, 
I would have been a-bed an hour ago. 

Par. These times of woe afford no times to woo. 
Madam, good-night; commend me to your daugh- 
ter. 

La. Cap. I will, and know her mind early to-mor- 
' row; • 10 

To-night she's mew'd up to her heaviness. 

Cap. Sir Paris, I will make a desperate tender 
Of my child's love. I think she will be rul'd 
In all respects by me ; nay, more, I doubt it not. 
Wife, go you to her ere you go to bed; 15 

Acquaint her here of my son Paris ' love ; 
And bid her — ^mark you me? — on Wednesday 

next — 
But, soft ! w^hat day is this ? 

Par. jMonday, my lord. 

Cap. Monday ! ha, ha ! Well, Wednesday is too 
soon, 
O' Thursday let it be, — o' Thursday, tell her, 20 

She shall be married to this noble earl. 
Will you be ready 1 Do you like this haste ? 
We '11 keep no great ado, — a friend or two ; 
For, hark you, Tybalt being slain so late, 
It may be thought we held him carelessly, 25 

Being our kinsman, if we revel much ; 
Therefore we '11 have some half a dozen friends, 



Act III. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 129 

And there an end. But what say you to Thursday ? 
Par.^ly lord, I woukl that Thursday were to- 
morrow. 
30 Cap. Well, get you gone ; o' Thursday be it, then. 
Go you to Juliet, ere you go to bed ; 
Prepare her, wife, against this wedding-day. 
Farewell, my lord. Light to my chamber, ho ! 
Afore me !, it is so very late that w^e 
35 jMay call it early by and by. Good-night. . 

[Exeunt. 



Scene V. [Capulet's orchard.] 

Enter Romeo and Juliet, aloft. 

J id. Wilt thou be gone ? it is not yet near day. 
It was the nightingale, and not the lark, 
That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear; 
Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate-tree. 
5 Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. 

Bom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, 
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. 
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
10 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. 
I must be gone and live, or stay and die. 

Jxd. Yond light is not day-light, I know it, I ; 
It is some meteor that the sun exhales, 
To be to thee this night a torch-bearer, ' 



130 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. So. v. 

And light thee on thy way to Mantua ; 15 

Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone. 

Bom. Let me be ta 'en, let me be put to death ; 
I am content, so thou wilt have it so. 
I'll say yon gray is not the morning's eye, 
'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow; 
Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat 
The vanity heaven so high above our heads. 
I have more care to stay than will to go. 
Come, death, and welcome ! Juliet wills it so. 
How is 't, my soul ? Let 's talk ; it is not day. 25 

Jul. It is, it is ! Hie hence, be gone, away ! 
It is the lark that sings so out of tune, 
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. 
Some say the lark makes sweet division; 
This doth not so, for she divideth us. 30 

Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes ; 
0, now I would they had chang'd voices too ! 
Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray. 
Hunting thee hence with hunt's-up to the day. 
O, now be gone ; more light and light it grows. 35 

Bom. More light and light; more dark and dark 
our woes ! 
Enter Nurse [from, the chamber] . 

Nurse. Madam! 

.Jul. Nurse? 

Nurse. Your lady mother is coming to your cham- 
ber. 
The day is broke; be wary, look about. [Exit.] 40 

Jul. Then, window, let day in, and let life out. 



Act III. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 131 

Bom. Farewell, farewell! One kiss, and 111 de- 
scend. 

He goeth down. 
Jut. Art tlioii gone so ! Love, lord, ay, husband, 
friend ! 
I must hear from thee every day in the hour, 
45 For in a minute there are many days. 
0, by this count I shall be much in years 
Ere I again behold my Romeo ! 

Rom. [From J)elow.] Farewell! 
I will omit no opportunity 
50 That may convey my greetings, love, to thee. 

Jul. 0, think 'st thou we shall ever meet again? 
Rom. I doubt it not; and all these woes shall 
serve 
For sweet discourses in our times to come. 
Jul. God, I have an ill-divining soul! 
55 Me thinks I see thee, now thou art below, 
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb. 
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look 'st pale. 

Rom. And trust me, love, in my eyes so do you ; 
Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu, adieu ! Exit. 
60 Jul. Fortune, Fortune ! all men call thee fickle ; 
If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him 
That is renown 'd for faith? Be fickle. Fortune; 
For then, I hope, thou wilt not keep him long, 
But send him back. 

Enter Lady Capulet. 
65 La. Cap. Ho, daughter ! are you up ? 

Jul. Who is't that calls? It is my lady mother. 



132 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. v. . 

Is she not down so late, or up so early? 
"What nnacciistom 'd cause procures her hither? 
La. Cap. Why, how now, Juliet? i 

Jul. Madam, I am not well. 

La. Cap. Evermore weeping for your cousin's 
death ? 70 

What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with 

tears ? • 
An if thou could 'st, thou could 'st not make him 

live ; 
Therefore, have done. Some grief shows much of 

love, 
But much of grief shows still some want of wit. 
Jul. Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss. 75 

La. Cap. So shall you feel the loss, but not the 
friend 
AVhich you weep for. 

Jul. Feeling so the loss, 

I cannot choose but ever weep the friend. 

La. Cap. Well, girl, thou weep'st not so much 
for his death, 
As that the villain lives which slaughter 'd him. 80 
Jul. What villain, madam? 
La. Cap. That same villain, Romeo. 

Jul. [Aside.^ Villain and he be many miles 
asunder. — v 

God pardon him ! I do, with all my heart; 
And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart. 
La. Cap. That is, because the traitor murderer 
lives. 85 



Act III. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 133 

Jul. Ay, madam, from, the reach of these my 
hands. 
"Would none but I might venge my cousin 's death ! 
La. Gap. We will have vengeance for it," fear 
thou not ; 
Then weep no more. I '11 send to one in Mantua, 
90 Where that same banish 'd runagate doth live, 
Shall give him su(ih an unaccustom'd dram, 
That he shall soon keep Tybalt company; 
And then, I hope, thou wilt be satisfied. 
Jul. Indeed, I never slxall be satisfied 
95 AVith Romeo, till I behold him — dead — 
Is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vex'd. 
]\Iadam, if you could find out but a man 
To bear a poison, I would temper it 
That Romeo should, upon receipt thereof, 
LOO Soon sleep in quiet. 0, how my heart abhors 
To hear him nam'd, and cannot come to him, 
To wreak the love I bore my cousin [Tybalt] 
Upon his body that hath slaughter 'd him ! 

La. Cap. Find thou the means, and 1 11 find such 
a man. 
-05 But now I'll tell thee joyful tidings, girl. . 

Jul. And joy comes well in such a needy time. 
What are they, beseech your ladyship ? 

La. Cap. Well, well, thou hast a careful father, 
child ; 
One who, to put thee from thy heaviness, 
-10 Ilath sorted out a sudden day of joy, 

That thou expects not nor I look'd not for. 



134 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. v. 

Jul. Madam, in happy time, what day is that ? 

La. Cap. Ma^ry, my child, early next Thursday 
morn, 
The gallant, young, and noble gentleman. 
The County Paris, at Saint Peter's Church, IIS 

Shall happily make thee there a joyful bride. 

Jul. Now, by Saint Peter's Church and Peter 
too. 
He shall not make me there a joyful bride. 
I wonder at this haste ; that I must wed 
Ere he that should be husband comes to woo. 12C 

I pray you, tell my lord and father, madam, 
I will not marry yet ; and, when I do, I swear, 
It shall be Eomeo, whom you know I hate, 
Rather than Paris. These are news indeed! 

La. Cap. Here comes your father ; tell him so 
yourself, 12= 

And see how he will take it at your hands. 
Enter Capulet and Nurse. 

Cap. When the sun sets, the air doth drizzle dew ; 
But for the sunset of my brother 's son 
It rains downright. 

How now ! a conduit, girl ? What, still in tears ? 13( 
Evermore show 'ring? In one little body 
Thou counterfeits a bark, a sea, a wind : 
For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea, 
Do ebb and flow with tears ; the bark thy body is, 
bailing in this salt flood ; the winds, thy sighs ; 13i 

Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them, 
Without a sudden calm, will overset 



Act III. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 135 

Thy tempest-tossed body. How now, wife ! 
Have you delivered to her our decree ? 
140 La. Cap. Ay, sir; but she will none, she gives 
you thanks. 
I would the fool were married to her grave ! 

Cap. Soft ! take me with you, take me with you, 
wife. 
How ! will she none ? Doth she not give us thanks ? 
Is she not proud ? Doth she not count her blest, 
145 Unworthy as she is, that we have wrought 
So worthy a gentleman to, be her bride? 
Jvl. Not proud, you have ; but thankful that you 
have. 
Proud can I never be of what I hate ; 
But thankful even for hate, that is meant love. 
LSO Cap. How how, how how, chop-logic! "What is 
this? 
''Proud," and "I thank you," and "I thank you 

not"; 
And yet "not proud." Mistress minion, you. 
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds, 
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next, 
.55 To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church, 
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither. 
Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you bag- 
gage ! 
You tallow-face ! 

La. Cap. Fie, fie ! what, are you mad ? 

Jul. Good father, I beseech you on my knees, 
.60 Hear me with patience but to speak a word. 



136 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. So. v. 

Cap. Hang thee, young baggage ! disobedient 
wretch ! 
I tell thee what : get thee to church o ' Thursday, 
Or never after look me in the face. 
Speak not, reply not, do not answer me ! 
My fingers itch. Wife, we scarce thought us blest I6i 
That God had lent us but this only child ; 
But noAV I see this one is one too much. 
And that we have a curse in having her. 
Out on her, hilding ! 

Nurse. God in heaven bless her ! 

You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so. 17( 

Cap. And why, my lady wisdom? Hold your 
tongue, 
Good prudence ; smatter with your gossips, go. 

Nurse. I speak no treason. 

Cap. 0, God ye god-den. 

Nurse. May not one speak ? 

Cap. Peace, you mumbling fool ! 

Utter your gravity o 'er a gossip 's bowl ; 17j 

For here we need it not. 

La. Cap. You are too hot. 

Cap. God's bread! it makes me mad. 
Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, 
Alone, in company, still my care hath been 
To have her match 'd; and having now provided 18i 
A gentleman of noble parentage, 
Of fair demesnes, youthful and nobly train 'd, 
Stuff 'd. as they say, with honourable parts. 



Act III. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 137 

Proportion 'd as one's thought would wish a man; 
185 And then to have a wretched puling fool, 

A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender. 

To answer, " I '11 not wed ; I cannot love, 

I am too young; I pray you, pardon me." 

But, an you will not wed, I '11 pardon you. 
190 Graze where you will, you shall not house with me. 

Look to't, think on't, I do not use to jest. 

Thursday is near ; lay hand on heart, advise. 

An you be mine, I '11 give you to my friend ; 

An you be not, hang, beg,' starve, die in the streets, 
195 For, by my soul, I '11 ne 'er acknowledge thee, 

Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. 

Trust to't, bethink you; I'll not be forsworn. Exit. 
Jul. Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, 

That sees into the bottom of my grief ? 
200 0, sweet my mother, cast me not away ! 

Delay this marriage for a month, a week; 

Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed 

In that dim monument where Tybalt lies. 

La. Cap. Talk not to me, for I'll not speak a 
word. 
205 Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee. 

Exit. 
Jul. God! — nurse, how shall this be pre- 
vented ? 

My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven ; 

How shall that faith return again to earth. 

Unless that husband send it me from heaven 
?10 By leaving earth ? Comfort me, counsel me ! 



138 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act III. Sc. v. 

Alack, alack, that heaven should practise strata- 
gems / 
Upon so soft a subject as myself! 
What say'st thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? 
Some comfert, nurse. 

Nurse. Faith, here it is. 

Romeo is banish 'd ; and all the world to nothing, 215 
That he dares ne'er come back to challenge you; 
Or, if he do, it needs must be by stealth. 
Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, 
I think it best you married with the County. 
O, he 's a lovely gentleman ! 220 

Komeo's a dishclout to him. An eagle, madam, 
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye 
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart, 
T think you are happy in this second match. 
For it excels your first; or if it did not, 225 

Your first is dead; or. 'twere as good he were. 
As living here and you no use of him. 
'Jul. Speak 'st thou from thy heart? 
^ Nurse. And from my soul too ; else beshrew them 
both. 

Jul. Amen! 230 

Nurse. What? 

Jul. Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous 
much. 
Go in ; and tell my lady I am gone. 
Having displeas'd my father, to Laurence' cell, 
To make confession and to be absolv'd. 235 



/.CT III. Sc. V.J EOMEO AND JULIET. I39 

Nurse. Marry, I will; and this is wisely done. 

[Exit.] 

Jul. Ancient damnation ! most wicked fiend ! 
Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn, 
Or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue 
240 Which she hath prais 'd him with above compare 
So many thousand times ? Go, counsellor ; 
Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain. 
I'll to the friar, to know his remedy; 
If all else fail, myself have power to die. Exit. 



ACT IV - 

Scene I. [Friar Laurence's cell.] 

Enter Friar Laurence and Paris. 

Fri. L. On Thursday, sir? The time is very 
' short. 

Par. My father Capulet will have it so; 
And I am nothing slow, to slack his haste. 
^Fri, L. You say you do not know* the lady's 

mind. 
Uneven is the course, I like it not. 5 

Far. Immoderately she weeps for Tybalt's death, 
And therefore have I little talk of love, 
For Venus smiles -not in a house of tears. 
Now, sir, her father counts it dangerous 
That she do give her sorrow so much sway, 10 

And in his wisdom hastes our marriage 
To stop the inundation of her tears ; 
Which, too much minded by herself alone, 
i\Iay be put from her by society. 

Now do you know the reason of this haste. ^ 15 

Fri. L. [Aside.] I would I knew not why it 
should be slow'd. 
Look, sir, here comes the lady toward my cell. 
Enter Juliet. 
Par. Happily met, my lady and my wife ! 

140 



Act IV. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 141 

Jul. That may be, sir, when I ma}^ be a wife. 
20 Far. That may be must be, love, on Thursday 
next. 
Jul. What must be shall be. 
FrLJ L,^^ _ That's a certain text. 

Par. Come you to make confession to this father ? 
Jul. To answer that, I should confess to you. 
Par. Do not deny to him that you love me. 
25 Jul. I will confess to you that I love him. 
Par. So will ye, I am sure, that you love me. 
Jul. If I do so, it will be of more price. 
Being spoke behind your back, than to your face. 
Par. Poor soul, your face is much abus'd with 
tears. 
30 Jul. The tears have got small victory by that, 
For it was bad enough before* their spite. 

Par. Thou wrong 'st it, more than tears, with 

that report. 
Jul. That is no slander, sir, which is a truth ; 
And what I spake, I spake it to my face. 
35 Par. Thy face is mine, and thou hast sland 'red it. 
Jul. It may be so, for it is not mine own. 
Are you at leisure, holy father, now ; 
Or shall I come to you at evening mass ? 

Fri. L. My leisure serves me, pensive daughter^ 
now. 
40 My lord, we must entreat the time alone. 

Par. God shield I should disturb . devotion ! 
Juliet, on Thursday early will I rouse ye ; 
Till then, adieu; and keep this holy kiss. Exit. 



142 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. i. 

Jul. 0, shut the door! and when thou hast 
done so, • 

Come weep with me, past hope, past care, past 

help ! 45 

Fri. L. Ah, Juliet, I already know thy grief ; 
It strains me past the compass of my wits. 
I hear thou must, and nothing may prorogue it. 
On Thursday next be married to this County. 

Jul. Tell me not, friar, that thou hearest of this, 50 
Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it. 
If, in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help. 
Do thou but call my resolution wise, 
And with this knife I '11 help it presently. 
God join'd my heart and Romeo's, thou our hands; 55 
And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal 'd, 
Shall be the label to another deed, 
Or my true heart with treacherous revolt 
Turn to another, this shall slay them both. 
Therefore, out of thy long-experienc 'd time, 60 

Give me some present counsel, or, behold, 
'Twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife 
Shall play the umpire, arbitrating that 
Which the commission of thy years and art 
Could to no issue of true honour bring. 65 

Be not so long to speak ; I long to die 
If what thou speak 'st speak not of remedy. 

Fri. L. Hold, daughter! I do spy a kind of 
hope, 
"Which craves as desperate an execution 
As that is desperate which we would prevent. 70 



Act IV. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 143 

If, rather than to marry County Paris, 

Thou hast the strength of will to slay thyself, 

Then is it likely thou wilt undertake 

A thing like death to chide away this shame, 

75 That cop 'st with Death himself to scape from it : 
And, if thou dar 'st, I '11 give thee remedy. 

Jut. 0, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, 
From off the battlements of any tower, 
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk 

80 Where serpents are ; chain me wdth roaring bears. 
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house, 
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones. 
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls ; 
Or bid me go into a new-made grave 

85 And hide me with a dead man in his shroud, — 
Things that, to hear them told, have made me 

tremble ; 
And I will do it without fear or doubt, 
To live an unstain 'd wife to my sweet love. 

Fri. L. Hold, then. Go home, be merry, give 
consent 

90 To marry Paris. Wednesday is to-morrow. 
To-morrow night look that thou lie alone ; 
Let not the nurse lie with thee in thy chamber. 
Take thou this vial, being then in bed. 
And this distilling liquor drink thou off; 

95 When presently through all thy veins shall run 
A cold and drowsy humour ; for no pulse 
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease ; 
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest; 



144 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. i. 



N 



The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade 

To paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall, 100 

Lik,e death, when he shuts up the day of life ; 

Each part, depriv'd of supple government. 

Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death: 

And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death 

Thou shalt continue two and forty hours, * 105 

And then awake as from a pleasant sleep. 

Now, when the bridegroom in the morning comes 

To rouse thee from thy bed, there art thou dead. 

Then, as the manner of our country is, 

In thy best robes uncovered on the bier 110 

Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault 

Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie. 

In the mean-time, against thou shalt awake. 

Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift. 

And hither shall he come ; and he and I 115 

Will watch thy waking, and that very night 

Shall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua. 

And this shall free thee from this present shame; 

If no inconstant toy, nor womanish fear. 

Abate thy valour in the acting it. . 120 

Jul. Give me, give me! 0, tell not me of fear! 

Fri. L. Hold ; get you gone, be strong and pros- 
perous 
In this resolve. I'll seijd a friar with speed 
To Mantua, with mj letters to thy lord. 

Jul. Love give me strength ! and strength shall 
help afford. 125 

Farewell, dear father! Exeunt. 



Act IV. Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. I45. 



Scene II. [Hall in Capulei's house.] 

Enter Capulet, Lady Capulet, Nurse, and Serv- 
ing-men, two or three. 

Cap. So many guests invite as here are writ. 

[Exit 1. Servant.] 
Sirrali, go hire me twenty cunning cooks. 

2. Serv. You shall have none ill, sir; for I'll try 
if they can lick their fingers. 
5 Cap. How canst thou try them so ? 

2. Serv. Marry, sir, 'tis an ill cook that cannot 
lick his own fingers; therefore he that cannot lick 
his fingers goes not with me. 

Cap. Go, be gone. Exit 2. Servant, 

10 We shall be much unfurnish 'd for this time. 
What, is my daughter gone to Friar Laurence? 
Nurse. Ay, forsooth. 

Cap. Well, he may chance to do some good on 
her. 
A peevish self-will'd harlotrj^ it is. 
Enter Juliet. 
15 Xurse. See where she comes from shrift with 
merry look. 
Cap. How now, my headstrong ! where have you 

been gadding? 
Jul. Where I have learn 'd me to repent the sin 
Of disobedient opposition 
To you and your behests, and am enjoin 'd 



146 KOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. ii. 

By holy Laurence to fall prostrate here, 20 

And beg your pardon. Pardon, I beseech you! 
Henceforward I am ever rul 'd by you. 

Cap. Send for the County; go tell him of this: 
I'll have this knot knit up to-morrow morning. 

Jul. I met the youthful lord at Laurence ' cell ; 25 
And gave him what becomed love I might, 
Not stepping o'er the bounds of modesty. 

Cap. Why, I am glad on 't ; this is well ; stand up. 
This is as 't should be. Let me see the County ; 
Ay, marry, go, I say, and fetch him hither. 30 

Now, afore Gcd ! this reverend holy friar, 
AH our whole city is much bound to him, 

Jul. Nurse, will you go with me into my closet. 
To help me sort such needful ornaments 
As you think fit to furnish me to-morrow ? 35 

La. Cap. No, not till Thursday; there is time 
enough. 

Cap. Go, nurse, go with her; we'll to church 
to-morrow. Exeunt Juliet and Nurse. 

La. Cap. We shall be short in our provision ; 
'Tis now near night. 

Cap. Tush, I will stir about. 

And all things shall be well, I warrant thee, wife ; 40 
'Go thou to Juliet, help to deck up her. 
I '11 not to bed to-night ; let me alone ; 
I'll play the housewife for this once. What, ho! 
They are all forth. Well, I will walk myself 
To County Paris, to prepare up him 45 

Against to-morrow. My heart is wondrous light, 



Act IV. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 147 

Since this same wayward girl is so reclaim 'd. 

Exeunt, 



Scene III. [Juliet's chamber.] 

Enter Juliet and Nurse. 

Jul. Ay, those attires are best ; but, gentle nurse, 
I pray thee, leave me to„myself to-night; 
For I have need of many orisons ^Wt-"^^^^'^ 
To move the heavens to smile upon my state, 
5 Which, well thou know'st, is cross and full of sin. 
Enter Lady Capulet. 
La. Cap. What, are you busy, ho? Need you 

my help ? 
Jul. No, madam; we have cuU'd sueh neces- 
saries 
As are behoveful for our state to-morrow. 
So please you, let me now be left alone, 
10 And let the nurse this night sit up with you ; 
For, I am sure, you have your hands full all, 
In this so sudden business. 

La. Cap. Good-night. 

Get thee to bed, and rest; for thou hast need. 

Exeunt [Lady Capidet and Nurse]. 
Jid. Farewell ! God knows when w^e shall meet 
again. 
15 1 have a faint cold fear thrills through myveins, 
. That almost freezes up the heat of life. 



148 KOMEO AXD JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. iii. 

1 11 call them back to comfort me. 

Nurse ! — What should she do here ? 

My dismal scene I needs must act alone. 

Come, vial. • 20 

What if this mixture do not work at all? 

Shall I be married then to-morrow morning? 

No, no ; this shall forbid it. Lie thou there. 

[Laying down her dagger.] 
What if it be a poison, which the friar 
Subtly hath minist'red to have me dead, 25 

Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour 'd. 
Because he married me before to Romeo ? 
I fear it is ; and yet, methinks, it should not, 
For he hath still been tried a holy man. 
How if, when I am laid into the tomb, 30 

I wake before the time that Romeo 
Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point! 
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault, 
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, 
And there die strangled ere my Rorneo comes ? 35 
Or, if I live, is it not very like, 
The horrible conceit of death and .night, 
Together with the terror of the place, — 
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle. 
Where, for this many hundred years, the bones 40 
Of all my buried ancestors are pack 'd ; 
Where bloody Tj^balt, yet but green in earth. 
Lies f est 'ring in his shroud; where, as they say, 
At some hours in the night spirits resort : — 
Alack, alack, is it not like that I, 45 



Act IV. Sc. iv.] EOMEO AND JULIET. I49 

So early waking, what with loathsome smells, 
And shrieks like mandrakes^ torn out of the earth, 
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad ; — 
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, 

50 Environed with all these hideous fears, 
And madly play with my forefathers' joints, 
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, 
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone 
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains? 

55 0, look ! methinks I see my cousin's ghost 
Seeking out, Romeo, that did spit his body 
Upon a rapier 's point. Stay, Tybalt, stay ! 
Romeo, I come ! This do I drink to thee. 

She falls upon her bed, within the curtains. 



Scene IV. [Hall in Capidet's house.] 

Enter Lady Capulet and Nurse. 

La. Cap. Hold, take these keys, and fetch more 

spices, nurse. 
Nurse. They call for dates and quinces in the 
pastry. 

.Enter Capulet. 
'Cap. Come, stir, stir, stir! the second cock hath. 
crow 'd. 
The curfew-bell hath rung, 'tis three o'clock. 
5 Look to the bak'd meats, good Angelica; 
Spare not for cost. 



150 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. iv. 

Nurse. Go, you cot-quean, go, 

Get you to bed. Faith, you '11 be sick to-morrow 
For this night's watching. 

Cap. No, not a whit! What! I have watch 'd ere 
now 
All night for lesser cause, and ne'er been sick. 10 
La. Cap. Ay, you have been a mouse-hunt in 
your time; 
But I will watch you from such watching now. 

Exeunt Lady Capulet and Nurse. 
Cap. A jealous-hood, a jealous-hood ! 
Enter three or four [Serving-men], with spits, logs, 

and baskets. 

Now, fellow. 

What's there? 

1. Serv. Things for the cook, sir; but I know 

not what. 15 

Cap. Make haste, make haste. [Exit 1, Serv.] 
Sirrah, fetch drier logs : 
Call Peter, he will show thee where they are. 

2. Serv. I have a head, sir, that will find out 

logs, . 
And never trouble Peter for the matter. [Exit. 

Cap. Mass, and well said ... 20 

Thou shalt be logger-head. Good faith, 'tis day. 

Music within. 
The County will be here with music straight, 
For so he said he would. I hear him near. 
Nurse ! Wife ! What, ho ! What, nurse, I say I 
Re-enter Nurse. 



Act IV. Sc. v.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 151 

25 Go waken Juliet, go and trim her up ; 

I '11 go and chat with Paris. Hie, make haste, 
Make haste ; the bridegroom he is come already. 
Make haste, I say. [Exeunt.] 



Scene V. [Juliet's chamber.'] 

[Enter Nurse.] 

Nurse. Mistress ! what, mistress ! Juliet ! — Fast, 
I warrant her, she. — 
Why, lamb ! why, lady ! fie, you slug-a-bed ! 
Why, love, I say, madam ! sweetheart ! why, bride ! 
What, not a word ? . . . 
5 Marry, and amen, how sound is she asleep ! 
I needs must wake her. Madam, madam, madam! 
Ay, let the County take you in your bed ; 
He'll fright you up, i' faith. Will it not be? 

[Draws hack the curtains,] 
What, dress 'd, and in your clothes! and down 
again! 
10 1 must needs wake you. Lady ! lady ! lady I 
Alas, alas ! Help, help ! my lady's dead ! 
0, well-a-day, that ever I was born! 
Some aqua vitce, ho ! My lord ! my lady ! 
Enter Lady Capulet. 
La. Cap. What noise is here? 
Nurse. lamentable day ! 

15 La. Cap. What is the matter ? 



152 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. v. • 

Nurse. Look, look! heavy day! 

La. Cap. me, me ! My child, my only life, 
Revive, look up, or I will die with thee ! 
Help, help ! Call help. 

Enter Capulet. 

Cap. For shame, bring Juliet forth; her lord is 
come. 

Nurse., She's dead, deceas'd, she's dead; alack 
the day! 20 

La. Cap. Alack the da}^, she's dead, she's dead, 
she's dead! 

Cap. Ha! let me see her. Out, alas! she's cold; 
Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; 
Life and these lips have long been separated. 
Death lies on her like an untimely frost 25 

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. 

Nurse. lamentable day! 

La. Cap. , woeful time! 

Cap. Death, that hath ta'en her hence to make 
me wail, 
Ties up my tongue, and will not let me speak. 
Enter Friar Laurence and Paris, with Musicians. 

F7^i. L. Come, is the bride ready to go to church? 30 

Cap. Ready to go, but never to return. 
son ! the night before thy wedding-day 
Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies, 
Flower as she was, deflowered by him. 
Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir; 35 

My daughter he hath wedded. I will die 
And leave him all: life, living, all is Death's. 



Act IV. Sc. v.] ROMEO AND JULIET. 153 

Par. Have I thought long to see this morning's 
face 
And doth it give me such a sight as this ? 
40 La. Cap. Accurs'd, unhappy, wretched, hateful 
day! 
Most miserable hour that e'er time saw 
In lasting labour of his pilgrimage ! 
But one, poor one, one poor and Idving child, 
But one thing to rejoice and solace in, 
45 And cruel Death hath catch 'd it from my sight ! 
Nurse. woe ! woeful, woeful, woeful day ! 
Most lamentable day, most woeful day, 
That ever, ever, I did yet behold ! 
O da^M day! hateful day! 
50 Never was seen so black a day as this. 
woeful day, woeful day ! 

Par. Beguil'd, divorced, wronged, spited, slain! 
Most detestable Death, by thee beguil'd. 
By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown ! 
55 love ! life ! not life, but love in death ! 

Cap. Despis'd, distressed, hated, martyr 'd, kill'd ! 
Uncomfortable time, why cam'st thou now 
To murder, murder our solemnity? 
child ! child ! my soul, and not my child ! 
60 Dead art thou ! Alack ! my child is dead ; 
And with my child my joys are buried. 

Fri.L. Peace, ho. for shame! Confusion's cure 
lives not 
In these confusions. Heaven and yourself 
Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all, 



154 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. v. 

And all the better is it for the maid. 65 

Your part in her you could not keep from death, 

But heaven keeps his part in eternal life. 

The most you sought was her promotion, 

For 'twas your heaven she should be advanc'd; 

And weep ye now, seeing she is advanc'd 70 

Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself? 

O, in this love, you love your child so ill, 

That you run mad, seeing that she is well. 

She 's not well married that lives married long ;^ 

But she's best married that dies married young. 75 

Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary 

On this fair corse ; and, as the custom is, 

In all her best array bear her to church ; 

For though fond nature bids us all lament. 

Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment. 80 

Cap. All things that we ordained festival, 
Turn from their office to black funeral; 
Our instruments to melancholy bells, 
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast, 
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change, 85 

Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, 
And all things change them to the contrary. 

Fri. L. Sir, go you in ; and, madam, go with him ; 
And go. Sir Paris ; every one prepare 
To follow this fair corse unto her grave. 90 

The heavens do lour upon you for some ill ; 
Move them no more by crossing their high will. 
Exeunt [Capulet, Lady Capulet, Paris, and Friar]. 



Act IV. Sc. v.J ROMEO AND JULIET. 155 

1. Mus. Faith, we may put up our pipes, and be 

gone. 

95 Nurse. Honest good fellows, ah, put up, put up ; 

For, well you know, this is a pitiful case. [Exit. 

1. Mus. Ay, by my troth, the case may be 

amended. • 

Enter [Peter]. 
Pet. Musicians, 0, musicians, ''Heart's ease, 
100 Heart 's ease ! " 0, an you will have me live, play 
"Heart's ease." 

1. Mus. Why ''Heart's ease"? 
Pet. 0, musicians, because my heart itself plays 
' ' My heart is full of woe. ' ' 0, play me some merry 
105 dump to comfort me. 

1. Mus. Not a dump we; 't is no time to play 
now. 

Pet. You will not, then? 
1. Mus. No. 
110 Pet. I will then give it you soundly. 
1. Mus. What will you give us? 
Pet. No money, on my faith, but the gleek; I 
will give you the minstrel. 

1. Mus. Then will I give you the serving- 
115 creature. 

Pet. Then will I lay the serving-creature's 
dagger on your pate. I will carry no crotchets; 
I '11 re you, I '11 fa you. Do you note me ? 
1. Mus. An you re us and fa us, you note us. 
120 2. Mus. Pray you, put up your dagger, and put 
oat your wit. 



156 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act IV. Sc. v. 

Pet. Then have at 3^011 with my wit ! I will 
dry-beat you with an iron wit, and put up my iron 
dagger. Answer me like men : 

''When griping grief the heart doth wound, 125 
[And doleful dumps the mind oppress,] 
Then music with her silver sound" — 
why ' ' silver sound ' ' ? Why ' ' music with her silver 
sound"? What say you, Simon Catling? 

1. Mus. Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet 130 
sound. 

Pet. Pretty ! What say you, Hugh Kebeck ? 

2. Mus. I say "silver sound," because musicians 
sound for silver. 

Pet. Pretty too ! What say you, James Sound- 135 
post? 

3. Mus. Faith, I know not what to say. 

Pet. O, I cry you mercy; you are the singer. I 
will say for you. It is "music with her silver 
sound, ' ' because musicians have no gold for 140 
sounding: 

J "Then music wdth her silver sound 
With speedy help doth lend redress. ' ' 

Exit. 

1. Mus. What a pestilent knave is this same ! 

2. Mus. Hang him. Jack! Come, well in here, 145 
tarry for the mourners, and stay dinner. 

Exeunt. 




M-t' 



^ 



ACT V 

Scene I. [Mantua. A street.] 

Enter Romeo. 

Eom. If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep, 
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand. 
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne, 
And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit 
5 Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. 
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — 
Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to 

think ! — 
•And breath 'd such life Avith kisses in my lips, 
•That I reviv'd, and was an emperor. 
10 Ah me ! how sweet is love itself possess 'd, 
When but love's shadows are so rich in joy! 

Enter Balthasar, his man, hooted. 
News from Verona ! — How now, Balthasar ! 
Dost thou not bring me letters from the friar? 
How doth my lad}^? Is my father well? 
15 How fares my Juliet ? that I ask again ; 
For nothing can be ill, if she be well. 

Bal. Then she is well, and nothing can be ilL 
Her body sleeps in Capel's monument. 
And her immortal part w^ith angels lives. 
20 I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault, 

157 



lo8 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. i. 

And presently took post to tell it you. 

O, pardon me for bringing these ill news, 

Since you did leave it for my office, sir. 

Rom. Is it even so ? Then I defy you, stars ! 
Thou know 'st my lodging ; get me ink and paper, 25 
And hire post-horses; I will hence to-night. 

Bal. I do beseech you, sir. have patience. 
Your looks are pale and wild, and do import 
Some misadventure. 

Eom. Tush, thou art deceiv'd: 

Leave me, and do the thing I bid thee do. 30 

Hast thou no letters to me from the friar? 

Bal. No, my good lord. 

Rom. No matter ; get thee gone 

And hire those horses ; I '11 be with thee straight. 

Exit Balthasar. 
Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night. 
Let's see for means. mischief , thou art swift 35 
To enter in the thoughts of desperate men! 
I do remember an apothecary, — 
And hereabouts 'a dwells, — which late I noted 
In tatt'red weeds, with overwhelming brows. 
Culling of simples; meagre were, his looks, 40 

Sharp misery had worn him to the bones. 
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, 
An alligator stuff 'd, and other skins 
Of ill-shap'd fishes; and abbut his shelves 
A beggarly account of empty boxes, 45 

Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds. 
Remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses, 



Act V. Sc. i.] EOMEO AND JULIET. . 159 

Were thinly scattered, to make up a show. 

Noting this penury, to myself I said, 
50 ' ' An if a man did need a poison now, 

Whose sale is present death in Mantua, 

Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him. ' ' 

0, this same thought did but forerun my need; 

And this same needy man must sell it me. 
55 As I remember, this should be the house. 

Being holiday, the beggar's shop is shut. 

What, ho! apothecary! 

Enter Apothecary. 
A^j^ Who calls so loud? ' 

Bom. Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor. 

Hold, there is forty ducats. Let me have 
30 A dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear 

As will disperse itself through all the veins 

That the life-weary taker may fall dead. 

And that the trunk may be discharg'd of breath 

As violently as hasty powder fir'd 
35 Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb. 

Ap. Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua's 
law 

Is 'death to any he that utters them. 

Bom. Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, 

And fear 'st to die ? Famine is in thy cheeks, 
70 Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, 

Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back ; 

The world is not thy friend nor the world 's law ; 

The world affords no law to make thee rich ; 

Then be not poor, but break it, and take this. 




160 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. ii. 

A^. My poverty, but not my will, consents. 75 

Rom. I pay thy poverty, and not thy will. 

iii>^ Put this in any liquid thing you will, 
And drink it oft' ; and, if you had the strength 
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight. 

Rom. There is thy gold, worse poison to men's 
souls, 80 

Doing more murder in this loathsome world, 
Than these poor compounds that thou maj^st not 

sell. 
I sell thee poison ; thou hast sold me none. 
Farewell ! Buy food, and get thyself in flesh. 
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me 85 

To Juliet's grave; for there must I use thee. 

Exeunt. 



Scene II. [Verona. Friar Laurence's cell.] 

Enter Friar John. 
Fri. J. Holy Franciscan friar ! brother, ho ! 

Enter Friar Laurence. 

Fri. L. TMs same should be the voice of Friar 
John. 
Welcome from Mantua! What says Romeo? 
Or, if his mind be writ, give me his letter. 

Fri. J. Going to find a bare-foot brother out, 
One of our order, to associate me, 
Here in this city visiting the sick, 



Act V, Sc. ii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 161 

And finding him, the searchers of the town, 
Suspecting that we both were in a house 
10 Where the infectious pestilence did reign, 
Seal'd up the doors, and would not let us forth; 
So that my speed to Mantua there was stay'd. 
Fri. L. Who bare my letter, then, to Romeo ? 
Fri. J. I could not send it, — here it is again, — 
15 Nor get a messenger to bring it thee. 
So fearful were they of infection. 

Fri. L. Unhappy fortune ! By my brotherhood, 
The letter was not nice but full of charge 
Of dear import, and the neglecting it 
20 May do much danger. Friar John, go hence ; 
Get me an iron crow, and bring it straight 
Unto my cell. 

Fri. J. Brother, I '11 go and bring it thee. Exit. 
Fri. L. Now must I to the monument alone ; 
25 Within this three hours will fair Juliet wake. 
She will beshrew me much that Romeo 
Hath had no notice of these accidents ; 
But I will write again to Mantua, 
And keep her at my cell till Romeo come ; 
30 Poor living corse, clos 'd in a dead man 's tomb ! 

Exit. 



162 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 



Scene III. [A churchyard; in it a tomh 'belonging 
to the Capidets.] 

Enter Paris^ and his Page with flowers and sweet 
water [and a torch]. 

Par. Give me thy torch, boy. Hence, and stand 
aloof. 
Yet put it ont, for I would not be seen. 
Under yond yew-trees lay thee all along, 
Holding thine ear close to the hollow ground; 
So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread, 5 

Being loose, unfirm, with digging up of graves. 
But thou shalt hear it. Whistle then to me, 
As signal that thou hear 'st something approach. 
Give me those flowers. Do as I bid thee, go. 
Page. [Aside.] I am almost afraid to stand 
alone K 

Here in the churchyard; yet I will adventure. 

[Retires.] 
Par. Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I 

strew, — 
woe! thy canopy is dust and stones — 
Which with sweet water nightly I will dew. 

Or, wanting that, with tears distill'd by moans, li 
The obsequies that I for thee will keep 
Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep. 

The Page whistles. 



Act V. So. iii. ] ROMEO AND JULIET. 163 

The boy gives warning something doth approach. 

What cursed foot wanders this way to-night, 
20 To cross my obsequies and true love 's rite ? 

What, with a torch! Muffle me, night, a while. 

[Retires.] 

Enter Romeo and Balthasar, with a torch, a mat- 
tock, and a crow of iron. 
Rom. Give me that mattock and the wrenching 
iron. 

Hold, take this letter ; early in the morning 

See thou deliver it to my lord and father. 
?5 Give me the light. Upon thy life, I charge thee, 

Whate 'er thou hear 'st or seest, stand all aloof, 

And do not interrupt me in my course. 

Why I descend into this bed of death. 

Is partly to behold my lady 's face ; 
10 But chiefly to take thence from her dead finger 

A precious ring, a l*ing that I must use 

In dear employment; therefore hence, be gone. 

But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry 

In what I farther shall intend to do, 
15 By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint 

And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs. 

The time and my intents are savage-wild. 

More fierce and more inexorable far 

Than empty tigers or the roaring sea. 
to Bal. I will be gone, sir, and not trouble ye. 

Rom. So shalt thou show me friendship. Take 
thou that; 

Live, and be prosperous ; and farewell, good fellow. 



164 KOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

Bal. [Aside.] For all this same, I'll hide me 
hereabout. 
His looks I fear, and his intents I doubt. 

[Retires.] ^ 

Rom. Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, 45 
Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth, 
Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, 
And, in despite, I '11 cram thee with more food ! 

[Opens the tomh.] 

Par. This is that banish 'd haughty Montague, 
That murd'red my love's cousin, with which grief , 50 
It is supposed, the fair creature died ; 
And here is come to do some villanous shame. 
To the dead bodies. I will apprehend him. 

[ Comes forward. ] 
Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague ! 
Can vengeance be pursued further than death ? 55 

Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee. 
Obey, and go with me ; for thou must die. 

Rom. I must indeed ; and therefore came I 
hither. 
Good gentle youth, tempt not a. desperate man. 
Fly hence, and leave me ; think upon these gone, 60 
Let them affright thee. I beseech thee, youth, ' 
Put not another sin upon my head. 
By urging me to fury: 0, be gone! 
By heaven, I love thee better than myself ; 
For I come hither arm'd against myself. 65 

Stay not, be gone ; live, and hereafter say 
A madman's mercy bid thee run away. 



Act V. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. Ig5 

Par. I do defy thy conjurations, 
And apprehend thee for a felon here. 
70 Eom. Wilt thou provoke me ? Then have at thee, 
boy ! They fight. 

Page. Lord, they fight ! I will go call the 
watch. [Exit.'] 

Par. 0, I am slain ! [Falls.] If thou be merciful, 
Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet. [Dies.] 

Bom. In faith, I will. Let me peruse this face. 
75Mercutio's kinsman, noble County Paris! 
What said my man, when my betossed soul 
Did not attend him as we rode ? I think 
He told me Paris should have married Juliet. 
Said he not so ? Or did I dream it so ? 
50 Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet, 
To think it was so ? 0, give me thy hand. 
One writ with me in sour misfortune 's book ! 
I '11 bury thee in a triumphant grave. 
A grave? 0, no! a lantern, slaught'red youth, 
IS For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes 
This vault a feasting presence full of light. 
Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interr'd. 

/ [Laying Paris in the toml).] 
How oft when men are at the point of death 
Have they been merry ! which their keepers call 
)0 A lightning before death. 0, how may I 
Call this a lightning ? O my love ! my wife ! 
Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, 
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. 
Thou art not conquer 'd ; beauty 's ensign yet 



166 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

Is crimson in thy lips and in tliy clieeks, 9i 

And Death's pale flag is not advanced there. 

Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet? 

0, what more favour can I do to thee, 

Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain 

To sunder his that was thine enemy? IC 

Forgive me, cousin ! Ah, dear Juliet, 

Why art thou yet so fair ? Shall I believe 

That unsubstantial Death is amorous, 

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps 

Thee here in dark to be his paramour ? IC 

For fear of that, I still will stay with thee. 

And never from this palace of dim night 

Depart again. Here, here will I remain 

With worms that are thy chamber-maids; 0, here 

Will I set up my everlasting rest, 11 

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 

From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your 

last! 
Arms, take your last embrace ! and, lips, you 
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss 
A dateless bargain to engrossing Death ! 11 

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide ! 
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on 
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark! 
Here's to my love! [Drinks.] true apothecary! 
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die. 12 

[Dies.] 
Enter Friak Laurence, with lantern, crow, mid 

spade. 



Act V. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. 167 

F7'i. L. Saint Francis be my . speed ! how oft 
to-night 
Have my old feet stumbled at graves! Who's 
there? 
Bal. Here 's one, a friend, and one that knows 

you well. 
Fri. L. Bliss be upon you ! Tell me, good my 
friend, 
;5 What torch is yond, that vainly lends his light 
To grubs and eyeless skulls ? As I discern, 
It burneth in the Capels' monument. 

Bal. It doth so, holy sir ] and there 's my master, 
One that you love. 
Fri. L. Who is it ? 

Bal. Romeo. 

10 Fri. L. How long hath he been there ? 

Bal. Full half an hour. 

F7^i. L. Go with me to the vault. 
Bal. I dare not, sir. 

My master knows not but I am gone hence ; 
And fearfully did menace me with death 
If I did stay to look on his intents. 
5 Fri. L. Stay, then; I'll go alone. Fear comes 
upon me : 
0, much I fear some ill unthrifty thing. , 

Bal. As I did sleep under this yew-tree here, 
I dreamt my master and another fought. 
And that my master slew him. ^ 

Fri. L. * Romeo ! 

[Advances.] 



168 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

Alack, alack, what blood is this, which stains i 

The stony entrance of this sepulchre? ' 

"What mean these masterless and gory swords 
To lie discolour 'd by this place of peace ? 

[Enters the tomb.] 
Romeo! 0, pale! Who else? What, Paris too? 
And steep 'd in blood ? Ah, what an unkind hour 1 
Is guilty of this lamentable chance ! 
The lady stirs. Juliet rises. 

Jul. comfortable friar! where is my lord? 
I do remember well where I should be. 
And there I am. Where is my Romeo ? 1 

[Noise within.] 

Fri. L. I hear some noise. Lady, come from that 
nest 
Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep. 
A greater power than we can contradict 
Hath thwarted our intents. Come, come away. 
Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead ; 1 

And Paris too. Come, I '11 dispose of thee 
Among a sisterhood of holy nuns. 
Stay not to question, for the watch is coming ; 
Come, go, good Juliet [Noise' again], I dare no 
longer stay. Exit. 

Jul. Go, get thee hence,' for I will not away. 1 

What 's here ? A cup, clos 'd in my true love 's hand ? 
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end. 
churl I drunk all, and left no friendly drop 
To help me after ? I will kiss thy lips ; 
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, 1 



Act V. Sc. iii.] KOMEO AND JULIET. 169 

To make me die with a restorative. 
Tliy lips are warm. 

Enter Watch, with the Page of Paris. 
1. Watch. Lead, boy ; which way ? 
Jul. Yea, noise? Then I'll be brief. happy 
dagger! [Snatching Romeo's dagger.] 

3 This is thy sheath (Stabs herself) ; there rust, and 
let me die. 

Falls [on Borneo's body, and dies]. 
Page. This is the place; there, where the torch 
doth burn. 

1. Watch. The ground is bloody ; search about 

the churchyard. 
Go, some of you, whoe'er yon find attach. 

[Exeunt some.] 
Pitiful sight ! here lies the County slain ; 
5 And Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead, 
Who here hath lain this two days buried. 
Go, tell the Prince ; run to the Capulets ; 
Raise up the Montagues; some others search. 

[Exeunt others.] 
We see the ground whereon these woes do lie ; 
[) But the true ground of all these piteous woes 
We cannot without circum^ance descry. 
Re-enter [some of the Watch, with] Balthasar. 

2. Watch. Here 's Romeo 's man ; we found him 

in the churchyard. 
1. Watch. Hold him in safety till the Prince 
come hither. 



170 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

Re-enter another Watchman, with Friar 
Laurence. ^ 
3. Watch. Here is a friar, that trembles, sighs, 
and weeps. le 

We took this mattock and this spade from him, 
As he was coming from this churchyard side. 
1. Watch. A great suspicion. Stay the friar too. 

Enter the Prince' [and Attendants]. 
Prince. What misadventure is so early up. 
That calls our person from our morning rest? 
Filter Capulet, Lady Capulet, a7id others. 
Cap. What should it be, that they so shriek 1£ 

abroad ? 
La. Cap. Oh ! the people in the street cry Romeo, 
Some Juliet, and some Paris; and all run, 
With open outcry, toward our monument. 

Prince. What fear is this which startles in our 

ears? 
1. Watch. Sovereign, here lies the County Paris 
slain ; IS 

And Romeo dead ; and Juliet, dead before. 
Warm and new kill'd. 

Prince. Search, seek, and know how this foul 

murder comes. 
1. Watch. Here is a friar, and slaughter 'd 
Romeo's man. 
With instruments upon them, fit to open 20 

These dead men's tombs. 

Cap. heavens! O wife, look how our daughter 
bleeds ! 



Act V. Sc. iii.] EOMEO AND JULIET. " 171 

This dagger hath mista'en,^ — for, lo, his house 
Is empty on the back of Montague, — 
(05 And is mis-sheathed in my daughter 's bosom ! 

La. Cap. me ! this sight of death is as a bell, 
That warns my old age to a sepulchre. 

Enter Montague [and others]. 

Prince. Come, Montague ; for thou art early up, 
To see thy son and heir more early down. 
10 Mon. Alas, my liege, my wife is dead to-night : 
Grief of mj son's exile hath stopp'd her breath. 
What further woe conspires against mine age? 
Prince. Look, and thou shalt see. 
Mon. thou untaught ! what manners is in this, 
15 To press before thy father to the grave ? 

Prince. Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, 
Till we can clear these ambiguities. 
And know their spring, their head, their true 

descent; 
And then will I be general of your woes, 
20 And lead you even to death. Meantime forbear, 
And let mischance be slave to patience. 
Bring forth the parties of suspicion. 

Fri. L. I am the greatest, able to do least, 
Yet most suspected, as the time and place 
25 Doth make against me, of this direful murder ; 
And here I stand, both to impeach and purge 
•Myself condemned and myself excus'd. 

Prince. Then say at once what thou dost know in 
this. 



172 ROMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

Fri. L. I will be brief, for my short date of 
, breath 
Is not so long as is a tedious tale. 23 

Romeo, there dead, was husband to that Juliet; 
And she, there dead, that Romeo's faithful wife. 
I married them; and their stolen marriage-day 
Was Tybalt's dooms-day, whose untimely death 
Banish 'd the new-made bridegroom from this city, 23 
For whom, and not for Tybalt, Juliet pin'd. 
You, to remove that siege of grief from her, 
Betroth 'd and would have married her perforce 
To County Paris. Then comes she to me. 
And, with wild looks, bid me devise some mean 2^4 
To rid her from this second marriage. 
Or in my cell there would she kill herself. 
Then gave I her, so tutor 'd by my art, 
A sleeping potion ; which so took effect 
As I intended, for it wrought on her 24 

The form of death. Meantime I writ to Romeo, 
That he should hither come as this dire night, 
To help to take her from her borrowed grave, 
Being the time the potion's force should cease. 
But he which bore my letter. Friar John, 25 

Was stay'd by accident, and yesternight 
Return 'd my letter back. Then all alone 
At the prefixed hour of her waking, 
Came I to take her from her kindred's vault; 
Meaning to keep her closely at my cell, 25, 

Till I conveniently could send to Romeo ; 
But when I came, some minute ere the time 



Act V. Sc. iii.J EOMEO AND JULIET. 173 

Of her awakening, here untimely lay 
The noble Paris and true Romeo dead. 

She wakes ; and I entreated her come forth, 
And bear this work of heaven with patience. 
But then a noise did scare me from the tomb ; 
And she, too desperate, would not go with me, 
But, as it se'ems, did violence on herself. 

5 All this I know ; and to the marriage 
Her nurse is privy ; and, if aught in this 
Miscarried by my fault, let my old life 
Be sacrific'd, some hour before his time, 
Unto the rigour of severest law. ' 

Prince. We still have known thee for a holy 
man. 
Where 's Romeo's man? What can he say to this? 
Bal. I brought my master news of Juliet's 
death ; 
And then in post he came from Mantua 
To this same place, to this same monument. 

5 This letter he early bid me give his father, 
And threat 'ned me with death, going in the vault, 
If I departed not and left him there. 

Prince. Give me the letter; I will look on it. 
Where is the County's page, that rais'd the watch? 

Sirrah, what made your master in this place ? 

Page. He came with flowers to strew his lady's 
grave ; 
And bid me stand aloof, and so I did. 
Anon comes one with light to ope the tomb, 
And by and by my master drew on him ; 



• 174 EOMEO AND JULIET. [Act V. Sc. iii. 

And then I ran away to call the watch. 28^ 

Prince. This letter doth make good the friar's 
words, 
Their course of love, the tidings of her death. 
And here he writes that he did buy a poison 
Of a poor 'pothecary, and therewithal 
Came to this vault to die, and lie with Juliet. 29( 

Where be these enemies ? Capulet ! Montague ! 
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, 
That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with 

love. 
And' I for winking at you-r discords too 
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish 'd. 29i 

Cap. brother Montague, give me thy hand. 
This is my daughter's jointure, for no more 
Can I demand. 

Mon. - But I can give thee more; 

For I will raise her statue in pure gold ; 
That whiles Verona by that name is known, 30( 

There shall no figure at such rate be set 
As that of true and faithful Juliet. 

Cap. As rich shall Eomeo's by hia lady's lie. 
Poor sacrifices of our enmity ! 

Prince. A glooming peace this morning with it 
brings ; 30! 

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head. 
Go hence to have more talk on these sad things ; 

Some shall be pardon 'd, and some punished: 
For never was a story of more woe 
Than this of Juliet and her Eomeo. Exeunt. 31C 



NOTES. 

ABBREVIATIONS. 

Abbott. — Shakespearian Grammar, by E. A. Abbott, 1870. 

Dowden. — Romeo and Juliet, edited by Edward Dowden, 1900. 

Deigbton. — Romeo and Juliet, edited by K. Deighton, 1893. 

Law. — Romeo and Juliet, edited by R. Law, in Tbe Arden 
Sbakespeare, Boston, 1913. 

N. B. D. — Murray's New English Dictionary. 

Schmidt. — Shakespeare-Lexicon, by A. Schmidt, 1886. 

Strunk. — Romeo and Juliet, edited by W. Strunk, in River- 
side Literature Series; Boston, 1911. 

Fi. — First Folio edition of Shakspere's Plays, 1623. Ff. — ^All 
the Folios. 

Qi. — First Quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, 1597. Q2. — 
Second Quarto. Qq. — All the Quartos. 

PROLOGUE 

Prol. 3. Mutiny. Discord, strife. 

Prol. 4. Where. In which. Civil. Of fellow citizens ; 
perhaps with a play on the ordinary sense. 

Prol. 6. Star-cross'd. Thwarted by the influence of malig- 
nant planets — implying the responsibility of blind Fate, rather 
than the guilt of hero and heroine, for the catastrophe of the 
tragedy. 

Prol. 7. Misadventur'd.- Unfortunate, caused by evil 
chance. Adjective, not participle; cf. horned, web-footed, etc. 

Prol. 8. Doth. Singular verb with plural subject. See 
Introd., p. 45. 

Prol. 9. Passage. Course. 

Prol. 11. But. Except. 

Prol. 12, Two hours'. Indicating the approximate length 
of performance of an Elizabethan play. Cf. Henry VIII._, 
prol. 13. 

Prol. 14. We, the actors, will try to repair what is deficient 
in the play. 

175 



176 ' NOTES 

ACT I 

I. i. Sliakspere's opening scenes are often notable, and 
none is more so than this. It gives the necessary information 
about the feud, not in expository speeches, but in the spirited 
action of a real brawl between the houses ; it introduces 
characters of importance ; it forebodes the tragic outcome of 
the play in the hatred of the partisans. Note the successive 
introduction of characters of greater and greater importance, 
with the culminating entrance, after due preparation, of the 
hero himself. 

I. i. 1. Carry coals. Put up with insults or indignities, 
like low menials. 

I. i. 2. Colliers. Also a term of insult because of the 
dirtiness of the trade. 

I. i. 12. Shall. Inevitably must. 

I. i, 13. Take the icall. Quarrels frequently arose as to 
which of two persons meeting should step aside from the 
wall — the best part of the walking on the narrow, dirty, 
undrained streets of the day. 

I. i. 15, 16. The weakest goes to • the Mall. Is thrust 
against the wall, gets the worst of it. A proverb. 

I. i. 23. Tool. Weapon, sword. Comes. See Introd., p. 45, 
Or perhaps merely the careless talk of servants. 

I. i. 28, 29. Fear me not .... I fear thee! "Don't be 
afraid that I should run away. . . . Do you think I would be 
afraid of you?" Characteristic quibbling. 

I. i. 29. Marry. Originally an oath by the Virgin Mary. 

I.i. 30. Of. On. 

I. i. 34. Bite my thumi). An insulting gesture used to pro- 
voke a quarrel. 

I. i. 55. Thy swashing hlotc. Your famous crushing stroke. 

I. i. 58. Art thou draion? Have you drawn your sword? 
Heartless hinds. Cowardly menials ; involving also a play on 
both words — hart, and hind, a female deer. 

1. 1. 59. Thee. See Introd., p. 45. 

I. i. 64. [Let me] Haiw at thee. Look out ; here goes ! A 
conventional fighting threat. 

I. i. 65. Cluhs, hills, and partisans. A call for men with 
these weapons. "Clubs !" was a familiar cry in Elizabethan 
street brawls, a call for the London apprentices, who fought 
with clubs. Bills, or halberds, were weapons with long poles 
terminating in a sword-like point and with hatchet-like 
blades. Partisans were somewhat similar instruments. 

I. i. 66, stage-dir. Gown. Dressing-gown — hurriedly donned 
by Capulet on his being aroused from bed by the fray. 



EOMEO AND JULIET I77 

I. i, 67. Long sicord, for active use, as opposed to tbe 
short ceremonial sword. 

I. i. 68. A crutch — as more appropriate to his age. 

I. i. 70. In spite. In despite or scornful defiance. 

I. i. 74. Projaners, etc. Who profane the use of swords 
by dyeing them in your neighbors" blood. 

I. i. 79. Distemper'd. Tempered or hardened for a bad 
purpose. Perhaps also "wrathful." 

I. i. 81. Airy tcord. Light word, i. e., excited by nothing 
more substantial than some lightly spoken taunt. 

I. i. 84. Ancient. Aged. 

I. i. 87. Cank'red. Rusty ; repeated in the sense of malig- 
nant. 

I. i. 96. Set . . . abroach. Set on, incited. To "broach" 
is to tap a cask of liquor and leave it running. 

I. i. 104. W7io for "which." See Introd., p. 45. Withal. 
With it (the swiyg). 

I. i. 106. On part and part. On either side. 

I. i. 107. Either part, i. e., the two contending factions. 

I. i. 112. Drare. An Elizabethan variant of '.'drove. " 

I. i. 11§. Affections. Feelings. 

I. i. 119. Which then most sought, etc. Which then 
sought chiefly a place where the fewest people would be found. 

I. i. 122. Who. Him who. 

I. i. 128. Aurora. The goddess of the dawn 

I. i. 129. Light . . . heavy. A favorite Elizabetlian pun. 
It is repeated in I. iv. 12. 

I. i. 143. With. See Introd., p. 47. Envious. Malignant. 

I. i. 149. " Grievance. Grief. Be much deni'd. He will 
have difficulty refusing me an answer, putting me aside. 

I. i. 151. To hear. As to hear. See Abbott, § 281. Shrift. 
Confession. 

I. i. 152. Morrow. Morning. 

I. i. 161. Love. Cupid. Tieiv. Appearance. 

I. i. 162. In proof. On experience. 

I. i. 163. View. Sight. Mu^ed. Blindfolded. StiU. Al- 
ways, as almost invariably in Elizabethan English. 

I. i. 164. See pathtvays to his kvill. Be, nevertheless, able 
to direct his arrows so as to wound whom he wishes. 

I. i. 167. Much. . . . with hate, more . . . with love. 
Rosaline, whom Romeo imagines he loves, is a Capulet maiden. 
See I. ii. 71. 

I. i. 168-174. These paradoxical phrases descriptive of love 
bad been traditional in European poetry since the time of 
the troubadours. Shakspere puts them into the mouth of 



178 NOTES 

Romeo to point the contrast between the nursing of his sen- 
timental feeling for Rosaline and the spontaneity of Ms gen- 
\une passion for Juliet. 

I. i. 169. Create, for "created," which form appears in Q2. 
See Introd., p. 46. 

I. i. 173. Still-waking. Always awake. 

I. i. 175. Coz. A familiar clipping of "cousin." 

I. i. 179. Propagate, etc. Increase by piling more on top 
of it. 

I. i. 183. Purg'd. Purified, cleansed (of smoke). 

I. i. 184. Vex'd. Troubled, not "running smooth." 

I. i. 186. Choking gall, i. e., a bitter dose which destroys ; 
rhetorically opposed to the "preserving sweet." See note to 
I. i. 168. 

I. i. 188. An. If. Originally the simple conjunction, and, 
used with the subjunctive to indicate* condition ; later differ- 
entiated in spelling and meaning. In Elizabethan idiom it 
was used alone or in combination with "if," as here. 

I. i. 191. Sadness. Seriousness. Cf. 1. 194, below. 

I. i. 193. Sadl}/. Seriously. 

I. i, 194. Sadness. Grief. 

I. i. 195. TJrg'd. Mentioned, forced on the attention. 

I. i. 201. TFtf. Way of thinking. 

I. i. 202. Proof. "Armor of proof," armor proved or 
tested. 

I. i. 204. Stay the siege, etc. Will not listen to protesta- 
tions of love. The comparison of a courted lady to a besieged 
castle is a favorite medieval and Elizabethan figure. Cf. 
Cymheline, III. iv. 136-7 ; Venus and Adonis, 423 ; Lear, V. iii. 
76. 

I. i. 208. With teauty . . . store. With her beauty dies 
the store of beauty (that should belong to posterity). For 
variations on this theme see Shakspere's Sonnets, 1-17. 

I. i. 211. Starved. Killed. 

I. i. 214. Merit hliss. Deserve heaven by remaining a 
virgin. 

I. i. 222ff. Romeo repeats the same idea under a variety of 
figures: other ladies will only serve as foils to exhibit Rosa- 
line's surpassing beauty. 

I. i. 223. Puts. See Introd., p. 45. But heing hlock may 
have been thought of as the subject. 

I. i. 224. Strucken. On form, see Introd., p. 46. 

I. i. 226. Mistress. General word for a woman beloved 
and courted. Passing. Surpassingly. Used as an adjective 
in 1. 228. 



ROMEO AND JULIET 179 

I. i. 227. What. What purpose. 

I. i. 230. Pay that doctrine. Give that instruction. 

I. ii. continues the dramatic exposition in giving informa- 
tion about Juliet ; starts a line of action — that of the mar- 
riage to the County Paris — which subsequently is one of the 
chief tragic forces ; makes all ready for the meeting of hero 
and heroine at the feast and the start of the main action ; 
and leaves the audience, at the conclusion of the scene, in 
eager expectation of just such an eventuality. 

The opening of the scene in the midst of a conversation is 
an approved bit of dramatic technique. Cf. also the entrance 
of Romeo and Benvolio at 1. 46. 

I. ii. 1. Bound. Bound to keep the peace. See I. i. 88, 89. 

I. ii. 9. Fourteen years. In Brooke's poem she is nearly 
sixteen ; in Painter's tale and the Italian and French ac- 
counts, nearly eighteen. (See Introd., p. 39.) Marina in 
Pericles is fourteen, Miranda in The Tempest is only fifteen, 
and Abigail in Marlowe's Jew of Malta is fourteen. 

I. ii. 13. Made. Qi reads married. The jingles between 
made and marred, and between marred and married, were 
favorites with the Elizabethan writers. Both occur else- 
where in Shakspere. Cf. Macbeth, II. iii. 35, and AlVs Well, 

II. iii. 315. 

I. ii. 14. All my hopes tut she. Hardly consistent with 

III. V. 166. On grammar of "she," see Introd., p. 44. 

I. ii. 15. My earth. The usual explanations are: (1) my 
body, as in II. i. 2 and Sonnet cxlvi ; (2) terre in the French 
phrase, fille de terre, my heiress ; (3) the world for me. The 
last seems, perhaps, most natural. 

I. ii. 17. To her consent is hut a part. Is subsidiary to her 
consent. See next two lines. Cf. Capulet's attitude in 
III. V. 127ff. 

I. ii. 23. Makes. Perhaps attracted into the sing, by the 
interposed "one more." But see also Introd., p. 45. 

I. ii. 25. Earth-treading stars, i. e., the girls at the feast. 

I. ii. 30. Inherit. Possess, enjoy. 

I. ii. 32, 33. The text follows Dowden's punctuation. "When 
you have seen more of her of most merit, many others, includ- 
ing my daughter, will have a place in a mere count of num- 
bers but not in esteem." On tchich for whom; see Introd., 
p. 45. The passage has been much emended. Which on is 
from Qi • the earlier Qq and Fi read Which one. 

I. ii. 39-42. Shoemaker . . . nets. The confusion of these 
proverbial sayings is characteristic of the humor of servants 
in Shakspere's earlier plays. 



180 NOTES 

I. ii. 45. In good time. Equivalent to the French a la 
1)071116 heure. "First rate !" (Said as he sees Eomeo and 
Benvolio approaching.) 

I. ii. 46-51. On rimes, see Introd., p. 40. 

•I. ii. 48. Holp. An old past tense and pp. of "help" (orig- 
inally a strong or irregular verb). , See Introd., p. 46. 

I. ii. 52. Your. The generalizing your. "The well-known." 
Cf. 1. 53. Plantain leaf. The leaf of this weed was used as 
a salve for bruises. 

I. ii. 53. Broken. Bruised. Romeo's jest hits at Benvolio 
for the superficiality of his love-remedies. Benvolio char- 
acteristically misses the point. (1. 54.) 

I. ii. 56, 57. Shut up in prison, etc. Describes the treat- 
ment often accorded the insane in Shakspere's day. Cf. 
the "joke" played on Malvolio in Ttcelfth Night, IV. ii. 

I. ii. 57. Ood-den. A corruption of "good e'en," which is 
in turn contracted from an original "God give you good 
even." See next line. This salutation was proper from the 
noon hour on. Cf. II. iv. 105. 

I. ii. 64. Rest you merry. God keep you merry — a cus- 
tomary salutation. Cf. 1. 85 below. 

I. ii. 66ff. The list of names is almost regular blank verse 
as it stands, and has been so printed by Dyce, Dowden, and 
others. 

I. ii. 67. Count},'. Count. 

I. ii. 69. Mercutio. Note that here he seems to be on 
friendly terms with the Capulets. 

I. ii. 71. Rosaline. Romeo's love. See 1. 87 below. 

I. ii. 74. Should they come? Are they expected to 
come? 

I. ii, 84, 85. Crush a cup. Have a drink, crack a bottle. 

I. ii. 87. Loves. So the earlier editions — a form permitted 
by Elizabethan usage. 

I. ii. 89. Unattainted. Unprejudiced, impartial. 

I. ii. 92ff. For the arrangement of rimes, see Introd., 
p. 40. 

I. ii. 92. Religion. Of course, his adoration of Rosaline's 
beauty. 

I. ii. 93. Turn tears to fires. In order to burn out his 
eyes, which, like heretics, have renounced their fai^h. 

I. ii. 94. These. His eyes, as also the "transparent here- 
tics" of the following line. Often droicn'd (in tears). The 
eyes are comtiared to witches, who, according to the popular 
conception, conld not he drowned, but had to be killed by 
burning. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 181 

I. ii. 99. Pois'd tvith herself. Since her image filled both 
your eyes, in these "crystal scales" she was weighed only 
against herself. 

I. ii. 100. That . . . scales. "Scales," though plural in 
form, is felt as singular in meaning. 

I. ii. 103. Scant. Barely. Shoiv. Appear. 

1. iii. continues the exposition, presenting the heroine and 
the chief comic figure (the Nurse). It creates suspense by 
continuing to keep the match with Paris in the fore- 
ground while the preparation for the meeting of the lovers 
goes on. 

I. iii. 2. WJiat. An exclamation of impatience. Ladybirds 
A term of endearment. 

I. iii. 3. God forbid — that anything should have happened. 

I. iii. 6. Give leave. Give us leave to talk in private. 

I. iii. 8. Rememb'red me. Used reflexively. See Introd., 
p. 45. Thou's. Thou shalt. A colloquialism. 

I. iii. 11. Lay. Wager. 

I. iii. 12. Teen. Grief, sorrow. 

I. iii. 14. Lammas-tide. August 1. 

I. iii. 21. Marry. See note on I. i. 29. 

T. iii. 22. Earthquake. See Introd., p. 36. 

I. iii. 25. Wormtoood. A plant with a bitter taste. See 
lines 29, 30 below. 

I. iii. 28. Bear a hrain. Have a good brain, a good; 
memory. 

I. iii. 31. Tetchy. Fretful. Fall out wi'. Quarrel with. 

I. iii. 35. High-lone. Alone. High in the compound seems? 
to be an intensive. Law compares "It's high time." Rood^ 
Holy Cross. A common oath. 

I. iii. 37. Broke. Broke the skin of, bruised, as in I. ii. 5S. 

I. iii. 39. Mark. Designate, elect. Grace. Divine favor. 

I. iii. 41. Live. . . . once. Only live. 

I. iii. 43. Marry. See I. i. 29, note, and I. iii. 21. 

I. iii. 45. Stands your dispositions. See Introd., p. 45. 

I. iii. 50. Ladies of esteem. See Introd., p. 44. 
' I. iii. 52. Much upon these years. At about the same age. 

I. iii. 56. A man of ivax. As pretty as if modeled in wax. 

I. iii. 63. Married. Mutually dependent and harmonious. 

I. iii. 64. Another. Dative case. Content. Pleasing, sat- 
isfying quality. 

I. iii. 66. Margent. Margin, in which explanatory glosses 
often appeared in old books. 

I. iii. 67. Unbound. Unattached (of the lover); without 
binding (of the book). 



182 NOTES 

1. iii. 68. Cover. A wife hinds a lover, as a cover hinds 
a book. 

I. iii. 69. The fish (Paris) lives in the sea (is at large 
and not yet hooked) . This figure is parenthetical. The 
metaphor of the book is resumed immediately. 

I. iii. 70. Foi' fair xoithout, etc. The beautiful cover 
(which may be Juliet) to enclose that beautiful book, Paris 
(the fair icithin). 

I. iii. 71. Share the glory. Gives part of it to the clasps ; 
i. e., the handsome husband with a beautiful wife shares his 
glory with her. 

I. iii. 75, Like of. Be pleased with. This use of like arose 
from an older impersonal use, as in, "It likes me of some- 
thing."" See Introd., p. 47. , 

I. iii. 76. Move. Incite. 

I. iii. 83. See I. ii. 67. 

I. iv. brings the meeting of hero and heroine a step nearer 
by showing us Romeo on the way to the, Capulets' ball. The 
scene is chiefly notable as introducing Mercutio and giving 
opportunity for his lyric effusion on Queen Mab. Romeo, in 
11. 48, 49 and in his closing speech, gives the first hint of a 
tragic outcome. 

I. iv. 1. Spoke. See Introd., p. 46. 

I. iv. 2. Shall tee on. See Introd., p. 46. 

I. iv. 3. The date is out of such prolixity. Such prolixity 
is out of date, i. e., the old fashion of having some one pre- 
cede those going masked to the feast and make an apologetic 
and complimentary speech. The custom is illustrated in 
Love's Lahour's Lost, Y. ii. 158 ; Timon, I. ii. 128 ; and Henry 
VII I J I. iv. 64. Benvolio, then, describes two such prologues, 
which were evidently in fashion. 

I. iv. 4. Hoodicink'd. Blindfolded. 

I. iv. 5. Tartar's . . . how. In form like the Cupid's bow 
— a common property for masques. Of lath, i. e., merely an 
imitation bow. 

I. iv. 6. Croic-keeper. Scarecrow. The word is used also 
of a boy employed to keep off birds from the crops. 

I. iv. 7. Islor no. On double negatives, see Introd., p. 47. 
Without-hook prologue. The prologue-speaker, trying to de- 
liver his hastily conned speech "without book," is compared 
±0 an actor attempting to pick up his part from the prompter. 

I. iv. 8. Entrance. Trisyllable. See Introd., p. 43. 

I. iv. 11. Torch. Torch-bearers (who did not dance) ac- 
companied the masquers. Amhling. Used contemptuously of 
affected movement, as in a dance. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 183 

I. iv. 12. Heavy . . . light. Cf. I. i. 129. Notice the 
numerous puns throughout this scene : measure . . . meas- 
ure, §ol€s . . . soulj soar . . . sore, tound . . . iound, etc. 

I. iv. 16. [Which] So stakes me. Elizabethan usage al- 
lowed the omission of a subject relative. See Introd., p. 45. 

I. iv. 21. Pitch. Point. Also the height to which a falcon 
soared. 

I. iv. 30. A visor for a visor. A mask for an ugly mask- 
like face. 

I. iv. 31. Quote. Take notice of. 

I. iv. 32. Beetle 'broics [which] shall hlush. See Introd., 
p. 45, and note to line 16 above. "Beetle brows" are over- 
hanging brows. 

I. iv. 34. Betake Mm to his legs, i. e., dance. 

I. iv. 35. Wantons. Sportive seekers after pleasure. 

I. iv. 36. Rushes were used as a floor-covering. 

I. iv. 37. Grandsire phrase; i.e., old saying, alluding to 
the proverb, "A good candle-holder proves a good gamester." 

I. iv. 38. Candle-holder, i. e., a mere looker-on. 

I. iv. 39. I am done. I stop playing (while I am winning). 

I. iv. 40. Dun's the mouse. A common Elizabethan phrase, 
of unknown origin, seeming to mean, "Keep still." Such 
a direction would be often given by a constable, would be 
"the constable's own word." 

I. iv. 41. Dun. The name of a horse. In an old Christmas 
game, "Dun is ip the mire" (mentioned by Chaucer in the 
Manciple's Prologue), a heavy log representing the horse is 
brought into the room, is supposed to stick in the mire, and 
is extricated by the players. 

I. iv. 42. Sir-reverence. A contraction of save reverence 
(Lat. salva reverentia) used as an apology when referring to 
something improper. The text follows Qi here. The other 
Qq read Or save you reverence; the Ff, Or save your 
reverence. 

I. iv. 43. We hum daylight. Mercutio uses this in the 
figurative sense of "wasting time," which he explains in 
11. 44, 45. 

I. iv. 46-7. Take our good meaning, etc. "Mercutio means, 
^Don't quarrel with a phrase like "we burn daylight" for not 
being literally true ; our interpretation is based oftener upon 
the speaker's known intent than upon any analysis by the 
•different mental faculties.' " (Strunk.) The term "five wits," 
though sometimes used for the five senses, means here intel- 
lectual faru]tio«. 

I. iv. 50. / dream'd a dream^. Romeo's dream has been a 



184 NOTES 

foreboding of disaster. See also 11. 103-110 below. To-night.. 
Last night. Cf. II. iv. 2. 

I. iv. 53. After this line Qi has "Ben : Queene Mab 
what's she?" and the rest of Mercutio's speech is assigned 
to Benvolio. Benvolio's interrogation was probably insei'ted 
to provide a pretext for Mercutio's long description, but 
hardly does so. The passage, though charming in itself, is 
hardly justifiable dramatically. 

I. iv. 53. Queen Mah. The first reference known in Eng- 
lish literature to this well-known figure of Celtic folk-lore. 

I. iv. 54. Fairies' midwife. Not midwife to the fairies, 
but the fairy whose function it was to deliver the fancies of 
dreamers, those "children of an idle brain" (1.94). (Steevens.) 

I. iv. 55. Agate-stone. A figure cut in agate stone and 
set in a ring. 

I. iv. 57. Atomies. Tiny beings. 

I. iv. 59. Spinners'. Spiders'. 

I. iv. 63. Film. Gossamer. 

I. iv. 65. Worm: Worms, according to popular belief, 
breed in the fingers of the idle. 

I. iv. 76. Sweetmeats, presumably, to perfume the breath ; 
elsewhere called "kissing comfits." 

I. iv. 79. Tithe-pig. A pig given to a parson as a church 
tax. 

I. iv. 80. 'A. Colloquialism for 7ie. 

I. iv. 84. Spanish blades. The swords made at Toledo, in 
Spain, were formerlj' highlj' esteemed. 

I. iv. 86. Drums. She drums. 

I. iv.'89. Plats the manes. Douce refers to a superstition, 
still living in his time, of spirits in the likenesses of women 
clothed in white who haunted stables at night, carrying 
tapers of wax, which they dropped on the horses' manes. 

I. iv. 90. Bakes. Cakes together, mats. - Elf-locks. Knots 
or tangles in the hair were sometimes attributed to the 
mischief or malice of elves. 

I. iv. 91. Bodes. Singular. Untangling is treated as the 
subject instead of the plural relative, ichich. 

I. iv. 97. Who. See Introd., p. 45. 

I. iv. 99. Being anger'd because the North remains frigid 
and doesn't melt to his wooing. 

I. iv. 103. I fear, too early, etc. The "tragic foreboding" 
often used effectively by Shakspere, and stressed with special 
force in this play of crossed fates. (See Prol. 6, and note.) 
Here characteristic of Romeo's temper. 

I. iv. 105. His. See Introd., p. 44, Date. Time. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 185 

I. iv. 106. Expire. On transitive use, see Introd., p. 47. 

I. V. The previous scenes have been chiefly expository and 
preparatory. This scone sets in motion the main action of 
the play — the love of hero and heroine, destined, as they 
themselves feel, to a tragic outcome. More definitely, the 
ill-suppressed wrath of Tybalt promises trouble later on. 
Aside from its significance in the plot, the scene is itself 
highly effective, with its crowded stage, picturesque costumes, 
and graceful dancing. 

I. V. 2. Trencher. Wooden platter. Potpan was too proud 
for such menial work as changing the trenchers and scraping 
them. 

I. V. 4. Good manners. Probably, the elegance of the 
entertainment. 

I. V. 6. Foul. (1) Shameful; (2) dirty. 

I. V. 7. Joint-stools. Folding stools. 

I. V. 8. Court'Cuphoard. A sideboard for setting out plate. 
Good thou. My good fellow, 

I. V. 9. Marchpane. A cake made from sugar and almonds. 
Loves. Cf. I. ii. 87, note. Ff read lovest. ' 

I. V. 12, 15. The speeches here given to "2 serv." and 
"3 serv," may belong respectively to Antony and Potpan, 
who here enter. 

I, v, 16. Longer liver take all. Let the survivor get the 
whole reward. A contemporary proverb. 

I. V. 19. WalJc a hout. Dance a turn. 

T, V. 21, Deny. Refuse. Makes dainty. Gives herself airs 
and hesitates to dance. 

I. V. 22. Come near ye. Come home to you, 

I. V. 28. A hall! A cry to make room. 

I. V, 29, Knaves. Still used in Shakspere in the sense of 
servant, but with a coloring of the modern meaning, rascals, 
coming from Capulet's impatience at their slowness. Turn 
the tahles up. "Ancient tabl-es were flat leaves joined by 
hinges and placed on trestles. When they were to be removed 
they were therefore turned up." (Steevens.) 

I. V. 30. Quench the fire. The time of the play is the 
middle of July (see I. iii. 14, and note), but in Brookes poem 
(see Introd., p. 38) the action occurs in midwinter. Shak- 
spere doubtless followed Brooke here, overlooking, as he fre- 
quently did, such a minor discrepancy. 

I. V. 32. Cousin. Kinsman. The word is used of any rel- 
ative not in the immediate family. In the present instance, 
it is probably "mine uncle Capulef (see I. ii. 70) who is 
addressed by Juliet's father. 



186 NOTES 

I. V. 35. Mask. Masquerade. By'r lady. A petty oath by 
the Virgin. 

I. y. 37. Nuptial. Regularly used in singular by Shakspere. 

I. V. 40, Elder. Older. Note restricted modern usage. 

I. V. 42. A ward. Under guardianship, and so not of age. 
After this line Qi adds, "Good youths i' faith. Oh, youth's a 
jolly thing." 

I. V. 47, It seems she hangs. F2, "Her beauty hangs." 
Cf. Sonnet xxvii, 11. 

I. V. 48, Cf. Lyly's Euphues: "A fair pearl in a Morian's 
[i. e., Moor's] ear." 

I. V. 50. Shoics. Appears. 

I, V. 56. Should. Mi-st certainly. 

I.v. 57. What. How. 

I. V. 58. Antic face. The fantastic mask Romeo wears. 

I. V. 59. Fleer. Sneer. Solemnity. Celebration. Used 
for any dignified festivity. 

I. V. 67. Content thee. Compose yourself, keep your tem- 
per. On reflexive use of "thee," see Introd., p. 45. 

I. V. 68. Portly. Of >^good carriage, 

I, V. 70. To he. On this use of infinitive, see Introd., p. 46. 

I. V. 72. Disparagement. Offence, injury, 

I, v, 75, Show a fair presence. Be affable and courteous. 

I. V, 76. Semblance. Appearance. 

I. V. 79. Goodman hoy. A familiar term of address, here 
used sarcastically, "My fine young fellow !" Go to. Come ! 
A phrase of reproof. 

I. V, 81. God shall mend my soul! As I hope to be saved ! 
Mend. Amend, save. 

I. V. 82, Mutiny. Discord. 

I. V. 83. Set cock-a-hoop. Raise a row, set everything in 
disorder. 

I. V. 86. Scathe. Injure. The rest of Capulet's speech is 
broken up among rebukes of Tybalt, answers to his guests, 
and directions to the servants. 

I. V. 87. Contrary. Contradict. See Introd., p. 43. 

T. V. 88. Well said. Well done. Princox. Saucy fellow. 

I. V. 91. Patience perforce. Compulsory patience — a pro- 
verbial expression. 

I. V. 95-112. For arrangement of rimes, see Introd., p. 40. 

I. V. 96. Fine. Ppnance. The old editions all rea(^ "sin," 
which some editors retain. 

I. V. 99. Pilgrim. Romeo wears the conventional disguise 
of a palmer, i. e., a pilgrim who had visited the Holy Land. 

I. V. 100. Which (the hand) only shows courteous rever- 



KOMEO AND JULIET 187 

ence, does not commit profanation, in this (touching, my 
hand), 

I. V. 107. Though [they] grant. 
^ I. V. 110. Took. See Introd., p. 46. 

I. V. 112. By the book. According to rule. 

I. V.117. Withal. With. 

I. V. 119. Chinks. Colloquialism for "mocey." 

I. V. 120. My foe's debt. A debt due my foe, which he 
may take or not, as \e pleases. 

I. V. 121. At the best. Cf. I. iv. 39. 

I. V. 122. Ay, so I fear. I fear that after tonight I shall 
never know such happiness. 

I. V. 124. Banquet. Dessert ; a course of sweetmeats, 
fruit, and wine. Towards. Coming, at hand. 

I. V. 125. Is it e'en so. According to Qi, "They whisper 
In his eare" [their reasons for going]. 

I. Y. 128. Fay. B'aith. 

I. V. 136. Married.. Trisyllabic, riming with bed. Note 
how Juliet tries to keep the Nurse in the dark by asking 
about two others before Romeo. 

I. V. 137. Like. Likely. 

I. V. 142. Prodigious. Portentous. 



ACT II 

Prol. Placed by some editors as an epilogue to Act I. 
There is no division into acts and scenes in the early texts 
of this play. As in the case of the first prologue, many 
critics have doubted whether Shakspere wrote it. In form, 
again, a Shaksperean sonnet. 

II. Prol. 1. Old Desire. The fancy for Rosaline. 

II. Prol. 2. Young affection. The new love for Juliet. 
Gapes, i. e., holds his mouth wide open to receive the longed- 
for morsel of the legacy. 

II. Prol. 3. Fair [woman], i. e., Rosaline. For . . . 
for. On repetition of prepositions, see Introd., p. 47. 

II. Prol. 6. Alike, i. e., both. 

II. Prol. 14. Temp'ring. Mixing. Extremities. Extreme 
difficulties or dangers. Extreme. Accent on first syllable. 

II. i. A brief scene to occupy the time between the Capu- 
lets' feast and Juliet's appearance at her window, to explain 
Romeo's presence in the garden, to show the ignorance of 
Romeo's love on the part of his friends, but chiefly, through 
the agency of Mercutio's wit, to provide a light interlude 



188 NOTES 

which shall break the seriousness cf I. v. and II. ii. and set off, 
by contrast, the strong emotion of the latter. 

II. i. 2. Earth. Body. Cf. I. ii. 15 and note. Centre, 
i. €., his heart, lost to Juliet. 

II. i. 4. Stol'n him. On reflexive use, see Introd., p. 47. 

II. i. 6. Conjure. Accented on first syllable. The differ- 
entiation between conjure and conjure was not made in 
Shakspere's time. See Introd., p. 43. 

II. i. 7flf. Romeo ! etc. Mercutio now utters a burlesque 
invocation similar to those used by conjurers. 

II. i. 7. Humours. Caprices, whimsicalities. 

II. i. 11. Gossip. Old crony. 

II, i. 13. Young Abraham Cupid. Abraham as a name for 
Cupid has caused much discussion. It may be used comi- 
cally of the eternal youth of Cupid, who must really be as old 
as Father Abraham. Knight thought it an allusion to the 
Abraham-men of Elizabethan days, cheats who feigned mad- 
ness. Dj'ce considered that ''auburn-haired (=light-haired) 
was meant, ahram, and abraham being old spellings of auburn. 
Upton thought it an expansion from Ahram, which in turn 
would be an easy misprint for Adam; if so, it might allude 
to Adam Bell, the famous archer of the old ballads. Many 
editors read Adam,, accepting this conjecture. 

II. i. 14. King Copheiua, referring to the famous ballad 
of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, preserved in Percy's 
Reliques. Mercutio had the following stanza in mind : 

The blinded boy that shoots so trim, 

From heaven down did hie, 
He drew a dart and shot at him. 

In place where he did lie. 

Shakspere again refers to the ballad in L.ove's Labour's Lost, 
I. ii. 114. 

II. i. 16. Ape. An expression of tenderness, like "^he 
Nurse's "fool" (I. iii. 30). 

II. 1. 20. An if. See I. i. 188, note. 

II. i. 26. Consorted. Associated. Humorous. (1) Moist; 
(2) capricious. 

II. i. 29.. Truckle-bed or trundle-bed ; a small bed made to 
run under a larger. Even that were better than "this field- 
bed." 

II. i. 30. Field-bed. The ground, with a play on the sense 
of "cpmp-bed." 

If. ii. In the petting of the moon-lit garden on the warm 



KOMEO AND JULIET 189 

Italian summer night is placed this celebrated scene of lyric 
love. The rapture of the passion, fervent yet chaste, and 
the almost incomparable beauty of the verse, have made this 
the favorite scene of the play. 

Fortune is for the pi-esent favoring the lovers ; yet even 
here there are presentiments of evil. 

II. ii. 1. He jests at scars. Romeo has overheard his 
companions' jests. A wall was probably represented on the 
stage, beside which he stayed within view of the audience 
during II. i. 

II. ii. 6. Her maid. A votary of the virgin Diana. 

II. ii. 8. Vestal livery. The robes of the sacred Roman 
priestesses, vowed to a life of chastity, who guarded the 
fire of Vesta ; used, by extension, of any virgin's robes, ^ick 
and green. Probably suggested by the so-called "green-sick- 
ness," an anaemic disease of young women in which the skin 
appears of greenish hue. Cf.^III. v. 157, and note. 

II. ii. 10. It is my lady. The rapturous outburst may be 
occasioned by the actual stepping out of Juliet upon the bal- 
cony. Hitherto she may have remained within the room or 
half-concealed by the window-curtains. 

II. ii. 17. Spheres. The hollow, transparent, concentric 
globes in which, according to the Ptolemaic astronomy, the 
planets were set. 

II. ii. 29. White-upturned. Looking upward so that the 
whites of the eyes show prominently. 

II. ii. 31. Lazy-pacing. So Qi. Ff and other Qq read 
lazy-puffing. 

II. ii. 39. Though not a Montague. Even if you refuse 
the name Montague. (See 1.34 above.) 

II. ii. 46. Oices. Owns. 

II. ii. 47. Doff. Put ofE, throw aside. 

II. ii. 53. Counsel. Secrets. 

II. ii. 55. Dear saint. He is thinking of their recent con- 
versation at the Capulets' ball. (See I. v. 105.) 

II. ii. 61. Dislike. Displease. See note on I. iii. 75. ' 

II. ii. 76. But. Unless. 

II. ii. 78. Prorogued. Delayed, postponed. Wanting of. 
On the use of the preposition, see Introd., p. 47. 

II. ii. 88. Dicell on form. Stick to convention. 

II. ii. 89. Fareicell compliment ! Away with formality ! 

II. ii. 93. Jove laughs. A proverb found in Ovid's Art of 
Love, "For Jove himself sits in the azure skies and laughs 
below at lovers' perjuries." (Marlowe's translation, bk. i.) 

II. ii. 97. So. Provided that. 



190 NOTES 

II. ii. 101, 102, Strange. Reserved. 

II. ii. 105, 106. Light .... dark. Again the favorite 
play on words. 

II. ii. 106. Which, The yielding. Discovered. Revealed 
(whereas its normal function should be to conceal). 

II. ii. 117. / liave no joy. Another of the premonitions 
of disaster which occur with such insistence throughout the 
earlier part of the play. Cf., e. g., I. iv. 103-108, I. v. 122, 
140-143. Contract. Accented by Shakspere on either syl- 
lable ; here on the second. See Introd., p. 43. 

II. ii. 119. Too like the lightning. Cf. Midsummer-Night's 
Dream, I. i. 145-148. 

II. ii. 131. Frank. Generous. 

II. ii. 132. The thing I have — her own infinite love, as 
explained in 11. 134, 135. Cf. II. vi. 33, 34. 

II. ii. 139. I am afeard. See note to 1. 117. above. 

II. ii. 143. Thy tent of love. The inclination, intentions 
of your love. 

Note that it is Juliet who takes the initiative. 

II. ii.l45. Procure to come. Cause to come, contrive to 
have sent. 

II. ii. 151. By and ty. At once. 

II. ii. 152. Suit. From Q4. The earlier Qq and the Ff 
read strife, but Brooke's poem, which Shakspere follows here 
pretty closely, also has "suit." 

II. ii. 154. So thrive my soul. As I hope that my soul 
may prosper. He is «,bout to protest the purity of his "bent 
of love" when interrupted by Juliet. 

II. ii. 160. Tassel-gentle. A male hawk of noble species ; 
a conventional comparison for a lover. Lure . . . tack 
was the sporting term for recalling the hawk. The hawks 
were trained to recognize the "falconer's voice." 

II. ii. 161. Bondage. Abstract for concrete, "one bound," 
i. e., here, one constrained for fear of being overheard. 

II. ii. 168. Attending. Listening, attentive. 

II. ii. 178. Wanton's tird. The pet bird of a mischievous 
girl. 

II. ii. 180. Gyves. Fetters. 

II. ii. 182. So loving-jealous. "So fond of it and yet so 
jealous of its getting its liberty." (Deighton.) 

II. ii. 186. Morrow. Morning. 

II. ii. 189. Ghostly. Spiritual. 

II. ii. 190. Dear hap. Good fortune. 

II. iii. Friar Laurence, the moralist of the play, here dis- 
courses in characteristic fashion, his long speech on the 



EOMEO AND JULIET 191 

virtues of herbs preparing for the sleeping potion of IV. i. 
He consents to unite the lovers in the hope of settling the 
feud — a hope which, after the re-excited passions of HI. i., 
seems like irony, but which is finally to be realized, though 
with tragedy. 

II. iii. 4. Titan's fiery ivlieels. The chariot of Helios, the 
sun god, a descendant of the race of Titans^who ruled the 
heavens before their expulsion by Zeus and the other 
Olympian gods. 

II. iii. 7. This osier cage of ours. This willow basket 
belonging to our religious house. 

II. iii, 9. That. See Introd., p. 45. 

II. iii. 12. Sucking. We find children (plants, etc.) suck- 
ing on her bosom. 

II. iii. 13. Virtues. Useful properties, r* 

II. ni. 15. Mickle. Great, powerful. Grace. Excellence. 

II. iii. 19. Strain'd. Wrenched, forced. 

II. iii. 20. Revolts from true Mrth. Gives over the good 
qualities with which it was endowed by nature. StumhUng 
on ahuse. Blundering and accidentally discovering abuse. 
Explained in next line. 

II, ii. 25. That part. The odorous part of the plant. 
Each part — of the body. 

II. iii. 27. Still. Ever. 

II. iii. 28. Grace. Virtue, gentle and self-controlled dis- 
position. Rude will. Violent, self-willed disposition ; almost, 
as Law notes, equivalent to "evil desires." In this passage 
and in II. vi. 9-15 there seems to be a reminiscence of the 
moral which Brooke found in the story. He regarded it as 
a warning, for he sought to describe "a couple of unfortunate 
lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the 
'authority and advice of parents and friends . . . abusing 
the honorable name of lawful marriage, to cloak the shame 
of stolen contracts, finally, by all means of unhonest life, 
hasting to most unhappy death." {Address to the Reader.) 
The change of point of view and sympathy in Shakspere is 
very notable. 

II. iii. 30. Canker. Canker-worm that eats blossoms. 

II. iii. 34. Distempered head. One in which the bodily 
"humors" of the old physiology, blood, phlegm, bile, and 
black bile, are improperly blended or '"tempered ;" hence a 
disturbed state. Cf. "distemperature" in 1. 40. 

II. iii. 35. Good marrow. Farewell. 

II. iii. 36. Keeps his natch. Is ever wakeful and on the 
alert. The primary jneaning of "to watch" is "to be awake." 



192 NOTES 

II. iii. 38. Unhruised. Uninjured, Unstuff'd with teem- 
ing thoughts and cares. 

II. iii. 40. Distemperature. See note on 1. 34 above. 

II. iii. 52. Lies. Sing., because of the sing, conception of 
hoth our remedies ("the remedy for both of us"). But see 
Introd., p. 45. 

II. iii. 54. Steads. Aids. 

I. iii. 55. Homely. Simple, plain. Drift. The tenor of 
your speech. 

II. iii. 56. Riddling. Given in riddles. Shrift. Abso- 
lution. 

II. iii. 60. All comMn'd. The arrangement is complete. 

II. iii. 63. Pass.' Walk along. 

II. iii. 66. Dear. On form, see Introd., p. 44. 

II. iii. 68. Hearts . . . eyes. Real love was, of course, of 
the heart, while that of the .eyes was niere passing fancy. 
For the conventional Eli:^abethan "debate" between hearts and 
eyes, see Sonnets xlvi, xlvii, and cxli, and the song in 
The Merchant of Venice, III. ii. 63ff, "Tell me where is fancy 
bred." v 

II. iii. 72. Season. Give a relish to. The figure recurs in 
All's Well, I. i. 55. 

II. iii. 74. Ancient. Elderly. Note the play with old, 
earlier in the line. 

II. iii. 86. Grace. Favor, kindness. Allow. Grant. 

II. iii. 88. Did read hy rote. Echoed phrases heard from 
others but had no real understanding of passion. 

II. iii. 92. To turn. As to turn. On use of the infinitive, 
see Introd., p. 46. 

II. iii. 93. / stand on. It is of importance to me to use. 

II. iv. A brilliant comedy scene, with the wit-combats of 
Mercutio and Romeo and the humor furnished by the Nurse. 
A notable transformation is shown in Romeo, produced by his 
love for Juliet. The sentimental, melancholy love-sickness 
of the earlier scenes is gone, and the hero is presented in an 
attractive guise, matching Mercutio at his favorite game of 
punning. With the mission of the Nurse the plans of the 
lovers for marriage proceed apace and the outlook is happy, 
except for the threat of trouble in Tybalt's challenge. 

II. iv. 2. To-night. Last night. Cf. I. iv. 50. 

II. iv. 8-11. Ansicer. Used in the sense now of replying 
to a letter, *now of encountering in person. Cf. Hamlet, 
V. ii. 176, 177. 

II. iv. 12. Dared. Challenged. 

II. iv. 15. Pin. Center of the target : the black pin which 



EOMEO AND JULIET 193 

stuck through the middle of the white clout and fastened the 
target to a support. 

II. iv. 16. Butt-shaft. An unbarbed arrow used for shoot- 
ing at butts or targets, 

II. iv. 19. Prince of cats. A play on Tybalt's name. 
Tibert (sometimes Tibalt) is the name of the cat in the 
famous medieval animal epic, Reynard the Fox. 

II. iv. 20. Captain of compliments. Master of the laws 
of ceremony in dueling. 

II. iv. 21. Prick-song. Music sung from notes (written or 
"pricked" down) and so formal and bookish. Time, distance, 
and proportion. Technical fencing ternns. See Jonson's 
Every Man in His Humour^, L. v. 154, 155. 

II. iv. 22. Minim rests. Half rests in music. Tybalt 
fences according to the rules, with the proper rests between 
strokes. 

II. iv. 23. Butcher of a silk hutton. Is able to cut any 
button he pleases. Proverbial for a skillful swordsman. 

II. iv. 24. Of the very first house. Meaning uncertain. 
Among other conjectures, the following have been made : of 
the best family ; of the best school of fencing ; of the first 
generation of descendants, and so an upstart. 

II. iv. 25. Of the first and second cause. Ready to quarrel 
for the most trifling reasons, the progression of which in 
seriousness, according to the formal rules of quarreling, he 
can accurately define. See Love's Labour's Lost, I. ii. 184, 
and As You Like It, V. iv. 52-108, for the recognized causes 
of quarrel. 

II. iv. 26. Passado. A step forward or aside in thrusting. 
Punto reverso. A back-handed stroke. Hai. A home-thrust. 
Technical Italian fencing terms. Mercutio ridicules the 
affected Italian fashion of fence in vogue among the 
fastidious. 

II. iv. 28. Pox. A petty curse. Antic. Fantastic. 

II. iv. 29. Fdntasticoes. Fantastical coxcombs. Tuners 
of accent. Speakers in affected phrase. Mercutio then pro- 
ceeds to mimic their style of speech and their fastidious 
diction. 

II. iv. 30. Blade. Swordsman. Tall. Sturdy, valiant. 

II. iv. 31. Grandsire. Applied with humorous exaggeration 
but some fitness to the staid Benvolio. 

II. iv. 32. Flies. The affected Osric in Hamlet (V. ii. 84) 
is called a "water-fly," while courtiers are termed "gilded but- 
terflies" in Lear, V. iii. 13. 

II. iv. 33. Fashion-monaers. Those who affect the newest 



194 NOTES 

fashions, fops. Perdona-mVs. Italian for "pardon me's." 
"These fellows with their snatches of foreign languages." 

II. iv. 34. Form. In the sense of "fashion," suggesting 
the quibble on it in the sense of "bench." Cannot sit at ease. 
Perhaps a hit at the huge, stuffed breeches in fashion. 

II. iv. 35. Bones. Perhaps a pun on "bon's." These gal- 
lants would cry affectedly "Bon !" (the French word) on see- 
ing a good stroke. 

II. iv. 38. Without his roe. Probably a pun on the first 
syllable of Romeo's name, which suggests the comparison fol- 
lowing. Dowden quotes "A herring without a roe" as a term of 
contempt from Troilus and Cressida, V. i. 68. 

II. iv. 39. Fishified. Simply, become'^like a fish, since he 
is like a dried herring. 

II. iv. 40. Laura. Petrarch's love, who is addressed in his 
sonnets. These were the great models for amorous verse in 
Elizabethan England. 

II. iv. 42. Love. Lover. Doicdy. Slattern ; untidy, slo- 
venly woman. 

II. iv. 43. Gipsy. Egyptian. Helen, the heroine of the 
Trojan war. Hero, of the Hero and Leander episode. Hild- 
ings. Menial wretches. Note Mercutio's humorous allitera- 
tion. 

II. iv. 44. TMshe. Her story is told in Midsummer-Night's 
Dream, V. i. 

II. iv. 46. Slop. Large breeches in the French fashion. 
Gave us the counterfeit. Played us a trick. For the pun, 
see next note. 

II. iv. 50. Slip. A counterfeit coin. 

II. iv. 55. Constrains a m,an to toiv. Note the pun on 
"strain courtesy" (curtsey bow) which Romeo proceeds to 
explain and still further play with (11. 56, 58). Hams. 
Thighs, knee-joints. 

II. iv. 57. Kindly. Naturally, appropriately. 

II. iv. 62. Flower'd, because pink'd, i. e., punched in holes 
in ornamental figures. 

II. iv. 67. Single-soVd. Thin, contemptible ; with perhaps 
a quibble on "soul." 

II. iv. 68. Singleness. Feebleness ; Mercutio's jest is abso- 
lutely alone in its kind for silliness. 

II. iv. 71. Switch and spurs. Urge on your wit with them. 

II. iv. 72. Cry a match. Claim the victory. 

II. iv. 73, 74. Wild-goose chase. A kind of "follow-the- 
leader" horse race. The horses were started together, the 
rider who gained the lead forcing the other to follow him, 



EOMEO AND JULIET 195 

wherever he chose to go. Wild-goose seems to have been used 
also in the sens^ of "rake." Cf. Fletcher's play, The Wild- 
Goose Chase. 

II. iv. 76. Was I tcith you, etc. Did I hit you there about 
the goose? 

Ii. iv. 79. Bite thee 1)1/ the ear. An expression of endear- 
ment among horses. 

II. iv. 80. Good goose, hite not. A "joculatory" proverb, 
as Ray's Prover'bs gives it. 

II. iv. 81. Bitter sweeting. The name of an apple. 

II. iv. So. WeU serv-d in. Allusion to the apple st-uce 
served with goose. 

II. iv. 8-5. Cheveril. Kid leather. 

II. iv. 86. Ell. An old measure of cloth ; in England, 45 
inches. 

II. iv. 89. A hroad goose. Romeo's exact meaning is not 
clear. Broad may mean plain, obvious. Perhaps a pun on 
"brood" or "brooding" goose is intended. Some editors, basing 
on Fi, read "far and wide abroad — goose." '' 

II. iv. 9.3. Drivelling. Doting, foolish. 

II. iv. 94. Natural. Idiot. 

II. iv. 96. Gear. Matter, business. 

II. iv. 100. An07i. ' Soon, immediately. 

II. iv; 101. Fan. Doubtless a huge one, as was the fash- 
ion, requiring a man to carry it. 

II. iv. 104. God ye good morroic. God give you a good 
morning. Mercutio mimics her. 

II. iv. 105. Good den. Good evening. See note on I. ii. 57. 

II. iv. 106. Is it good den? i. e., past noon. 

Ii. iv. 109, 110. Made . . . mar. A favorite jingle. Cf. 
I. ii. 13, and note. 

II. iv. 121. Confidence. The Nurse's blunder for confer- 
ence. The same blunder is made by Mrs. Quickly (Merry 
Wires, I. iv. 172), and by Dogberry (Much Ado, III. v. .3). 

II. iv. 12.3. Indite. Benvolio here ventures a jest, by 
changing, in the manner of the Nurse, "invite" to "indite." 

II. iv. 124. So ho ! The conventional cry of the hunter 
when he startij a hare. Romeo at once asks what game he has 
found. 

II. iv. 138. "Lady, lady, lady." Refrain from the Ballad 
of Susanna, quoted in Ticelfth Night, II. iii. 84. 

II. iv. 1.39. Merchant. Fellow. 

II. iv. 140. Ropery. Roguery. 

II. iv. 143. Stand to. Maintain. 

II. iv. 145. Lustier. More vigorous. 



196 NOTES 

II. iv. 146. Jacks. Fellows. 

II. iv. 147. FUrt-giUs. Flirting women. 

II. iv. 148. SJcams-mates. The word occurs nowhere else, 
and has not been satisfactorily explained. Malone's "cut- 
throat companions" fits the context fairly well. Perhaps the 
Nurse would have found difficulty in defining her meaning. 

II. iv. 154. The law on my side. Peter has been trained in 
the school of Sampson and Gregory. See I. i. 39ff. 

II. iv. 166. Weak. Indefensible. 

II. iv. 167. Commend. Remember. 

II. iv. 176. Shrift. Confession. 

II. iv. 178. Shriv'd. Confessed and absolved. 

II. iv. 180. Go to. A common phrase of expostulation. Cf. 
I. V. 79. 

II. iv. 184. Tackled stair. Rope ladder. Its nautical use 
suggests the following metaphor. 

II. iv. 185. Top-gallant. Top-gallant mast: small mast 
fixed to the head of the main or fore top-mast. So height, 
pinnacle. 

II. iv. 186. Convoy. Means of conducting me — carrying 
out the nautical figure. 

I [. iv. 187. Quit. Requite, reward. 

I\;. iv. 188. Mistress. Trisyllable. See Introd., p. 43. 

H.iv. 197. Lay knife aboard. Perhaps, share her table, 
inai\*y her. 

Il.iv. 200. Properer. Handsomer. 

II iv. 201. Versal. Vulgarism for "universal." 

I] . iv. 202. Rosemary. The symbol of remembrance, used 
esp4cially at weddings and funerals. Cf. Ophelia's mention of 
it, Hamlet, IV. v. 175. 

II. iv. 203. With, a letter. With the same letter. 

II. iv. 205. The dog's name, from its resemblance to a 
growl. "R is the dog's letter, and hirreth in the sound." (Ben 
Jonson in his English Grammar. ) The Romans called R the 
dog's letter. 

II. iv. 207. Sententious. The Nurse's grammar appears to 
be uncertain. "I think the Nurse means sentences in the sense 
of adages or maxims . . . Possibly we should read senten- 
tions." (Dowden.) 

II. V. Another highly humorous scene. More preparation 
for the marriage. 

II. V. 7. Doves drew the chariot of Venus. 

II. V. 14. Bandy. Toss to and fro, hurry. Originally a 
term in tennis. 

II. V. 16, Marry, feign. Johnson's emendation for "many 



EOMEO AND JULIET I97 

feign" of the old editions. There may be a corruption in the 
text at 11. 15-17. 

II. V. 22. Them. Shakspere in different places uses news 
as both singular and plural. 

II, V. 25. Give me leave. Leave me alone. Cf. I. iii. 6. 

II. Y. 26. Jaunce. Hard jaunt. 

II. V. 36. Stay the circumstance. Wait for the details. 

II. V. 38. Simple. Silly. 

II. V. 42. Talked on. Talked of. See Introd., p. 47. 

II. V. 45. Go thy ways. Go on your way — about whatever 
you have to do. Wench. Girl. In familiar, but not vulgar 
usage. What. Well ; by the way. 

II. V. 52. Beshretv. Curse ; but milder in sense then. 
Equivalent to "plague." 

II. V. 63. Come up. A phrase of reproof or impatience, 
like "Go to." 

II. V. 66. Coil. Fuss, confusion. 

II. V. 71. Wanton. Untamed. 

II. V. 72. Be in scorlet. Blush. 

II. vi. The climax of the lovers" fortunes, clouded, however, 
by the omnipresent forebodings. 

II. vi. 9. These violent delights. See note on II. iii. 28. 

II. vi. 12. His. On use of his for its, see Introd., p. 44. 

II. vi. 13. Confounds. Destroys. 

II. vi. 21. Confessor. Accent on first syllable. See In- 
trod., p. 43. 

II. vi. 23. As much, i. e., the same greeting. 

II. vi. 25. That. Used instead of repeating if. 

II. vi. 26. Blazon. To describe in proper heraldic terms, 
and so, as here, to describe fitly. 

II. vi. 30. Conceit. Fancy, imagination. 

II. vi. 32. Worth. Wealth. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, 
I. i. 15 : "There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd." 

II. vi. 34. Sum of half, i. e., a total equal to only half. 

ACT III. 

III. i. The second act closed with Romeo and Juliet about 
to be married in spite of the conditions that had seemed to 
make their union impossible. But the tragic force of the feud 
now breaks rudely in, and the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt 
make this scene the turning point from which the action moves 
on to its fatal close. 

III. i. 6. Me. Ethical dative. Cf. him in 1. 9 below. See 
Introd., p. 45. 



198 NOTES 

III. i. 8. By the opei'ation, etc. By the time that the sec- 
ond cup of wine begins to affect him. 

III. i. 9. Dratoer. Tapster, waiter. 

III. i. 12. Jack. Fellow. Cf. II. iv. 146. 

III. i. 13. Mood. Ill-humor. 

III. i. 14. Moody. Angry. 

III. i. 15. What to ? Moved to what ? In the next line 
Mercutio pretends to understand to as tioo. 

III. i. 33. An. If. Cf. I. i. 188, note. 

III. i. 34. Fee-simple. Absolute ownership. 

III. i. 40. Good den. Good even. Cf. I. ii. 57, note. 

III. i. 48. Consort. Mercutio puns on the two meanings, 
"keep company," and "a band of musicians." 

III. i. 51. 'Zounds. By God's wounds ; a disguised oath by 
the wounds of Christ. 

III. i. 54. Reason coldly of. Discuss coolly. 

III. i. 55. Depart. Separate. 

III. i. 65. Enables one to suppress the rage that should 
follow. 

III. i. 68. Injuries. Insults. 

III. i. 73. Tender. Hold. 

III. i. 76. Alia stoccata carries it away. The fencer wins 
the day. AUa stoccata is Italian for "with the rapier-thrust." 

III. i. 77. Rat-catcher. Cf. "king of cats" in 1. 79, and cf. 
II. iv. 19, and note. Walk. Step aside with me. 

III. i. 81. Dry-Tieat. Beat soundly. 

III. i. 83. His pilcher. Its scabbard. The word is not 
known elsewhere in this sense. Cf. Introd., p. 44. 

III. i. 87. Passado. A step forward or aside in fencing. 
Cf. II. iv. 26. 

III. i. 89. Outrage. Trisyllabic. See Introd., p. 43. 

III. i. 93. Sped. Done for. 

III. i. 105. The 'book of arithmetic. The textbook of 
fencing. 

III. i. 120. Aspir'd. Soared to. 

III. i. 122. Moe. Comparative of many. 

III. i. 126. Respective lenity. Considerate mildness. 

III. i. 127. Conduct. Guide. 

III. i. 137. Amaz'd. Stupefied. 

III. i. 139. Fool. Mock, sport. 

III. i. 145. Discover. Reveal. « 

III. i. 146. Manage. Conduct, course. 

III. i. 157. Nice. Foolishly trivial. 

III. i. 160. Take truce, etc. Make peace with the ungov- 
ernable rage. 



ROMEO AND JULIET 199 

III. i. 171. Eniylous. Malicious. 

III. i. 173. By and hy. Soon. Cf. II. ii. 151 and III. 
iii. 76. 

III. i. 191. I have an interest — as a kinsman of Mercutio's. 

III. i. 193. Amerce. Punish by fine. 

III. ii. The main function of this scene is to give the first 
assurance that Juliet is to remain true to Romeo in spite of 
the death of Tybalt. I-Ier ignorance of this fact adds the 
poignancy of irony to the lyric fervor of her opening speech, 
which, as has often been noted, is essentially an epithalamium 
or marriage song. 

III. ii. 2. Phoehus'. Apollo, the sun-god's. 

III. ii. 3. Phaetlion. The son of Helios, who obtained from 
his father the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun for a 
day. He was too weak to restrain the horses, and nearly de- 
stroyed the universe. 

III. ii. 6. Runatvap's eyes. -No convincing explanation of 
this famous difficulty has been found. The foregoing allusion 
to Phaethon makes more plausible the interpretation of run- 
aioay as the sun, whose horses ran away with him ; and we 
might suppose that the article "the" is, absorbed in that. For 
a summary of the attempts made to solve this puzzle, see Ap- 
pendix to Furness's Yariorum edition. 

III. ii. 10. Civil. Sober, quiet. 

III. ii. 12. The terms in this line are from falconry. 
A hawk when unmanned, or not completely trained to 
submit to being handled, was hooded to stop its 'bating, or 
fluttering. 

III. ii. 13. Strange. Shy. 

III. ii. 23. Garish. Glaring. 

III. ii. 38. Envious. Cf. III. i. 171, note. 

III. ii. 43. Ay. Usually printed "I" in Shakspere's time. 

III. ii. 45. Cockatrice. A fabulous serpent, supposed to bg 
able to kill with its glance. 

III. ii. 49. Determine of. Decide. 

III. ii. 51. God save the mark! God have mercy on us! 
The origin of the phrase is disputed, but mark probably means 
"race," as in Chaucer's phrase, "all the mark of Adam," Can- 
terT)urp Tales, D 696. The first Quarto reads, God save the 
sample. 

III. ii. 54. Gore-hlood. Clotted blood. 

III. ii. 76. Just. Exact, precise. Justly. Exactly. 

III. ii. 106. Worser. ■ See Introd., p. 44. 

III. ii. 115. Needly. Of necessity. 

III. ii. 118. Modern. Ordinary. 



200 NOTES 



/ 

III. ii. 124. Sound. Utter ; or, less probably, reach to tbe 
bottom of. 

III. ii. 125. 7s. See Introd., p. 45. 

III. ii. 135. Wot. Know. 

III. iii. This scene shows Romeo's behavior under the blow 
of his banishment, as the previous scene showed Juliet's. 

III. iii. 1. Fearful. Full of fear. 

III. iii. 2. Parts. Gifts, qualities. 

III. iii. 10. Yanlsh'd. Issued, passed. 

III. iii. 20. Exile. Accented on second syllable. Contrast 

I. 13, above, and 43, below, and see Introd., p. 43. 
III. iii. 26. JRush'd aside. Dodged. 

III. iii. 33. Talidity. Worth, value. 

III. iii. 34. Courtship. The ideas of ''courtiership" and 
"wooing" seem to be combined here. 

III. iii. 45. Mean of death. Shakspere often uses mean 
for modern "means." 

III. iii. 52. Fond. Foolish. 

III. iri. 63. Let me discuss your situation with you. 

III. iii. 76. By and hi/- Immediately. Cf. III. i. 73 and 

II. ii. 151. 

III. iii. 77. Simpleness. Folly. 

III. iii. 87. Bluhh'ring. This word was not undignified in 
Elizabethan English. 

III. iii. 90. 0. Expression of grief. 

III. iii. 94. Old. Confirmed. 

III. iii. 98. ConceaVd lady. Secret wife. 

III. iii. 103. Level. Line of fire. 

III. iii. 115. Tempered. Composed, blended. 

III. iii. 122. Wit. Intelligeuce. 

III. iii. 123. WliicJi. See Introd., p. 45. 

III. iii. 127. Digressing. Deviating. 

III. iii. 134. Dismemh'red. Blown tp pieces with the pow- 
der with which you should have defended yourself. 

III. iii. 151. Blaze. Publish. 

III. iii. 166. Here stands all your state. Your fortune de- 
pends entirely on your acting as follows. 

III. iii. 174. Brief. Soon. 

III. iv. In this scene is introduced the factor that inter- 
feres with the plan just outlined by the Friar, and produces 
the complication that leads to the catastrophe. 

III. iv. 2. Move. Spea'k to. 

III. iv. 11. Mew'd up. Shut up — originally in a case, as a 
hawk when it is "mewing" or molting. 

III. iv. 12. Desperate tender. Kash offer. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 201 

III. iv. 34. Afore me! God before me I' Before God ! 

' III. V. This scene falls into two parts. The first, the part- 
ing of the lovers, shows that we have passed the culmination 
of the love story. The fact that it so closely resembles a 
conventional dawn song helps us to realize its fervid lyrical 
quality. In the second part, the fatal motive of the match 
with Parts rapidly makes Juliet's position untenable, and 
forces her to take matters into Ijer own hands. The ripening 
of the heroine's character under the tremendous strain of 
events is remarkably portrayed. 

III. V. 3. Fearful. Cf. III. iii. 1, note. 

III. V. 20. Reflex of Cynthia's Itroio. Reflection of the face 
of the moon. 

III. V. 29. Division. Melody; originally thought'of as the 
dividing of a succession of long notes into short ones. 

III. V. 31. Change eyes. This was a popular belief, be- 
cause the toad's eyes are beautiful, and the lark's ugly. If 
they had changed voices," Juliet 'would not be reminded by the 
lark's song that day had come. 

' III. V. 34. Hunt's-vp. The song to awaken hunters. 
It was also used as a morning song to a newly married 
wife. 

III. V. 43. Friend was often used in the sense of lover. 
Dowden prints love-lord, ay, hushand- friend , thinking to avoid 
anti-climax. 

III. V. 54. Ill-divining . Anticipating evil. Note once 
more the use of presentiment. Cf. II. ii. 177, note. 

III. V. 59. Dry sorroiv, etc. It was believed that sorrow 
and sighing dried up the blood. 

III. V. 67. Doicn. In bed. ■ , 

III. V. 68. Procures. Induces her to come. 

III. V. 74. Wit. Intelligence. Cf. III. iii. 122. 

III. V. 75. Feeling. Deeply felt. 

III. V. 95. Dead. Understood by Juliet to go with what 
follows, meant to be understood by her mother to go with 
what precedes. 

III. V. 98. Temper. Mix. 

III. V. 106. Needy. Poor in joy. 

III. V. 112. In happy time. A vague exclamation, getting 
its color from the particular context. Here it means little 
more than, "Well, then," with a slight ironical flavor. Con- 
trast "In good time," I. ii. 45, and note. 

III. V. 142. TaJce me tcith you. Let me. understand you. 

III. V. 145. Wrought. Brought it about. 



202 NOTES 

III. V. 146. Bride. Used for both sexes in Elizabethan 
English. 

III. V. 150. Chop-logic. Quibbler. 

III. V. 152. Minion. Spoiled darling. 

III. V. 154. Fettle. Put in condition. 'Gainst. In prepa- 
ration for. 

III. V. 157. Crreen-sickness. An ailment of young girls. 
Cf. II. ii. 8, note. 

The language applied by Capulet would hardly seem to the 
Elizabethans so disgusting as to us. Clarke notes how the 
phrase indicates to us the paleness of Juliet as she realizes 
her situation. 

III. V. 169. HiUing. Base wretch. Cf. II. iv. 43. 

III. V. 172. Smatter. Chatter. 

III. V. 173. God ye god-den. God give you good even. Cf 
I. ii. 57, note. 

III. V. 175. Gossip's hoicl. The drink at a christening 
feast, the original sense of gossip being a -sponsor at baptism. 

III. V. 177, 178. For the meter of these lines, see Introd., 
p. 41. 

III. V. 183. Parts. Qualities. 

III. V. 186. Mammet. Doll. In her fortune's tender. When 
good fortune is offered her. 

III. V. 192. Lap hand on heart. Give it serious considera- 
tion. 

III. V. 216. Challenge. Claim. 

III. V. 222. Green. Many passages have been collected 
from old writers showing that green eyes were much admired. 

III. V. 223. Beshreiv. Curse. Cf. II. v. 52, and note. 

ACT IV 

This is Juliet's act. Romeo does not appear in it ; and 
during his absence in Mantua, the heroine faces her desperate 
situation, accepts the Friar's plan, and carries it through with 
superb courage and self-mastery. The maturing of character 
noted in the last act proceeds more rapidly than ever, while 
the network of entanglement closes in round the lovers. 

IV. i. 3. To slack. That I should slacken. Or the line 
may be taken as a virtual double negative with intensifying 
force. 

IV. i. 5. Uneven. Not straightforward. 

IV. i. 11. Marriage. Trisyllabic. See Introd., p. 43. 

IV. i. 28. Spoke. See Introd., p. 46. 

IV. i. 29. Ahus'd. Disfigured. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 203 

IV. i. 38. Evening mass. In the sixteenth century mass 
was still at times celebrated in the evening. 

IV. i. 40. Entreat the time alone. Ask to be left alone. 

IV. i. 41. Shield. Forbid. 

IV. i. 45. Care. The first Quarto reads cure. 

IV. i. 48. Prorogue. Postpone. 

IV. i. 57. Label. Used for the seal which was attached to 
a deed by means of a label or slip of parchment. 

IV. i. 64. Commission. Warrant, authority. 

IV. 1. 83. Reeky. Foul. Chapless. Lacking the lower 
jaw. 

IV. 1. 94. Distilling. The first Quarto reads distilled; but 
it may mean "penetrating." Cf. "The leperous distilment" 
and its effects in Hamlet^ I. v. 64 ff. 

IV. i. 97. Surcease. Cease. 

IV. i. 105. Tico and forty hours. The critics have been 
much disturbed because the -period indicated would carry 
Juliet's sleep beyond the hour implied in V. iii. 147. But the 
audience in the theater is hardly likely to make arithmetical 
calculations exact enough to reveal the inconsistency. 

IV. i. 113. Against, etc. In preparation for thy awaking. 
Cf. IV. ii. 46. 

IV. i. 119. Inconstant toy. Trifling fickleness. 

IV. ii. 14. Harlotry. Wench, slut. Abstract for concrete. 

IV. ii. 26. Becomed. Befitting. Trisyllabic. 

IV. ii. 33. Closet. Private chamber. 

IV. ii. 34. Sort. Select. 

IV. iii. 5. Cross. Perverse. 

IV. iii. 8. Behoveful. Fitting, necessary. 

IV. iii. 29. Still been tried. Always been proved. 

IV. iii. 37. Conceit. Idea. 

IV. iii. 39. As. Namely. Receptacle. For accent see In- 
trod., p. 43. 

IV. iii. 42. Green in earth. Newly buried. 

IV. iii. 47. Mandrakes' . The forked root of the mandra- 
gora bears some resemblance to the human figure, and when 
pulled out of the earth it was supposed to utter shrieks that 
drove the hearer mad. 

IV. iii. 49. Distraught. Distracted. 

IV. iii. 57. Stay. Hold back. 

IV. iv. Note in this light scene the irony of the bustle of 
preparations which the audience knows to be in vain. 

IV. iv. 2. Pastry. The room where paste was made. 

IV. iv. 4. Curfew-hell. Strictly, of course, an evening bell ; 
but N. E. D. quotes this passage from the Liverpool Municipal 



204 NOTES 

Records of 1673 and 1704 : "Ring Curphew all the yeare long 
at 4 a clock in the morning and eight at a night." 

IV. iv. 6. Cot-quean. A man who meddles with household 
matters. 

IV. iv. 8. Watching. Waking. 

IV. iv. 11. Mouse-hunt. Pursuer of women. 

IV. iv. 13. Jealous-hood. Jealousy; abstract for concrete, 
jealous woman. 

IV. iv. 21. Logger-head. Blockhead. 

IV. V. The quartette of wailing by the Nurse, the father 
and mother, and Paris is so nearly absurd here that some crit- 
ics have thought that Shakspere was burlesquing similar 
exaggerated scenes in contemporary tragedy. Cf. Midsum- 
mer-Night's Dream, V. i. The comic dialogue at the close of 
the scene hardly serves, as some of Shakspere's comic scenes 
do, to throw the serious passage into higher relief. The whole 
scene is archaic, and may be presumed to stand as it was 
written in the earlier form of the play. See Introd., p. 37. 

IV. V. 38. Thought long. Yearned. 

IV. V, 57. Vncomfortable. Discomforting, joyless. 

IV. V. 69, 70. Advanc'd. Promoted . . . raised up. 

IV. V. 73. Well. "We use to say the dead are well," 
Antony and Cleopatra, II. v. 32. 

IV. V. 76. Rosemary. A symbol of immortality, used 
both at weddings and at funerals. Cf. 1. 86, below, and 
II. iv. 202. 

IV. V. 79. Fond. Foolish. 

IV. V. 96. Case. There is probably a pun here on the 
"case" in which the instruments were put up. 

IV. V. 99. [Peter.] Qs reads Enter Will Kemp, showing 
that this part was played by the famous comedian. 

IV. V. 105. Dump. A mournful tune. 

IV. V. 112. Gleek. Scoff. 

IV. V. 113. Give you the minstrel. Usually, but not very 
convincingly, explained as a pun on "gligman," gleeman or 
minstrel, with reference to gleeJc, above. It may mean m'erely, 
"call you minstrel," to which "give you the serving-creature" 
is parallel, both minstrel and serving-creature being meant 
scornfully. 

IV. V. 117. Carry no crotchets. Bear no whims ; with a 
pun on the musical meaning of crotchets, carried out by 
note, below. 

IV. V. 123. Dry-'beat. Cf. III. i. 81, note. 

IV. V. 125-127. From a poem by Richard Edwards. 

IV. V. 129. Catling. A fiddlestring of catgut. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 205 

IV. V. 132. Reheck. A three-stringed fiddle. 
IV. V. 135. Soundpost. "The pillar or peg which supports 
the belly of a stringed instrument." (Dowden.) 

IV. V. 145. Jack ! Fellow ! contemptuously. Cf. III. i. 12. 

ACT V 

V. i. This scene exhibits in Romeo a growth in character 
parallel to that seen in Juliet in Act IV. The wordy expres- 
sion of grief which marked him in III. iii. is now past, and 
he shows himself a man capable of rapid decision and de- 
termined action. In regard to the plot, the scene shows the 
last movement of the tragic action started bj' Romeo's igno- 
rance of the Friar's plan. 

V. i. 1. Flattering truth of sleep. Pleasing dreams that 
seem true. Qi reads flattering eye. 

V. i. 3. Bosom's lord. Heart. 

V. i. 6-9. Note here again the irony so pervasive in this 
play. 

V. i. 24. Stars ! Romeo defies the destiny that had fated 
him to live without Juliet. 

V. i. 28, 29. Import some misadventure. Signify some evil 
happening. 

V. i. 38. 'A. He: "a common colloquial form. 

V. i. 39. Overwhelming. Overhanging. 

V. i. 40. Simples. Medicinal herbs. 

V. i. 51. Present. Immediate. 

V. i. 60. Soon-speeding gear. Stuff that will operate 
quickly. 

V. i. 67. Utters. Sells. 

V. ii. In this short scene Shakspere unobtrusively pre- 
sents the element of chance — the non-delivery of the letter — 
which precipitates the tragedy. 

V. ii. 5, 0. The Franciscans (hare-foot brothers) went about 
in pairs. 

V. ii. 18. Nice. Trivial. Charge. Importance. 

V. ii. 19. Dear. This adjective is often used with a merely 
intensive force. 

V. ii. 26. Beshrew. Curse. 

V. iii. In this final scene the conflict between the wills of 
the lovers and the unfavorable social situation produces the 
catastrophe. But there is no spiritual disaster, for the lovers 
keep faith to the end ; and, even externally, their death is not 
sheer waste, for it leads to the reconciliation of the feud be- 
tween their families and produces civil peace. 



206 NOTES 

V. iii. 1. Stage-dir, Sweet tcater. Perfumed water. 

V. iii. 3. All along. At full length. 

V. iii. 14. Which. The antecedent is flowers, 1. 12. 

V. iii. 20. Cross. Interfere with. 

V. iii. 32, Dear. Of great and intimate importance to me. 

V. iii. 33. Jealous. Suspicious. 

V. iii. 45. Detestable. For accent see Introd., p. 43. 

V. iii. 68. Conjurations. . Entreaties. 

V. iii. 86. Presence. Room of state. 

V. iii. 96. Advanced. Raised. 

V. iii. 110. *S'e* up my . . . rest. Be fully determined. 
Originally derived from games of cards, especially primero, 
where it meant to bet on one's hand. 

V. iii. 111. Shake the yoke, etc. Cf. V. i. 24, and note. 

V. iii. 115. Dateless. Without limit. Engrossing. Acquir- 
ing wholesale. 

V. iii. 121. Be my speed. Prosper me. 

V. iii. 122. Stumhled. An ill omen. 

V. iii. 136. Unthrifty. Unfortunate. Fi reads unlucky. 

V. iii. 148. Comfortable. Comforting. 

V. iii. 162. Timeless. Untimely. 

v. iii. 170. Rust. Qi reads rest. 

V. iii. 173. Attach. Arrest. 

v. iii. 181. Circumstance. The details. 

V. :■ 214. Manners is. See Introd., p. 45. 

V. iii. 216. Outrage. Passionate outcry. 

V. iii. 247. As. A redundant particle, formerly common 
with adverbs and adverbial phrases of time. 

V. iii. 2.~>0. Which. See Introd., p. 45. 

V. iii. 270. Still. Always. 

v. iii. 280. Made. Was doing. 

V. iii. 294. Winking at. Shutting my eyes to. 

V. iii. 295. Brace of kinsmen. Mercutio and Paris. 



WORD INDEX 



'A, I. iv, 80; V. i. 38. 

Abraham Cupid, II. i. 13. 

Abroach, I. i. 96. 

Abuse, II. iii. 20. 

Abus'd, IV. i. 29. 

Advanc'd, IV. v. 69, 70; V. iii. 1 

Affections, I. i. 118. 

Afore me. III. iv. 34. 

Against, IV. i. 113. 

Agate-stone, I. iv. 55. 

Airy, I. i. 8i: - 

Alike, II. Prol. 6. 

Alia stoccata. III. i. 76. 

All along, V. iii. 13. 

Amaz'd, III. i. 137. 

Ambling, I. iv. 11. 

Amerce, III. i. 193. 

An, I. i. 188; II. i. 20; III. i. 33. 

Ancient, I. i. 84; II. iii. 74. 

Anger'd, I. iv. 99. 

Anon, II. iv. 100. 

Another, I. iii. 64. 

Answer, II. iv. 8-11. 

Antic, I. V. 58; II. iv. 28. 

Ape, II. i. 16. 

Appertaining, III. i. 65. 

As, IV. iii. 39; V. iii. 247. 

As much, II. vi. 23. 

Aspir'd, III. i. 120. 

Atomies, I. iv. 57. 

Attach, V. iii. 173. 

Attending, II. ii. 168. 

Aurora, I. i. 128. 

Ay, III. ii. 43. 

Bakes, I. iv. 90. 
Bandy, II. v. 14. 
Banquet, I. v. 124. 
Bare-foot brother, V. ii. 5, 6. 
Bating, III. ii. 12. 
Bear a brain, I. iii. 28. 
Becomed, IV. ii. 26. 
Beetle brows, I. iv. 32. 
Behoveful, IV, iii. 8. 



Being black, I. i. 223. 

Bend, II. iii. 33. 

Bent, II. ii. 143. 

Beshrew, II. v. 52; III. v. 223; 

V. ii. 26. 
Best, I. V. 121. 
Betake, I. iv. 32. 
Bills, I. i. 65. 
Bate, II. iv. 80. 
Bite, II. iv. 79. 
Bite thumb, I. i. 34. 
Bitter sweeting, II. iv. 81. 
Blade, II. iv. 30. 
Elades, I. iv. 84. 
Blaze, III. iii. 151. 
Blazon, II. vi. 26. 
Bliss, I. i. 214. 
Blubb'ring, III. iii. 87. 
Bodes, I. iv. 91. 
Bondage, II. ii. 161. 
Bones, II. iv. 35. 
Book, 1. V. 112. 

Book of arithmetic. III. i. 105. 
Bosom's lord, "V. i. 3. 
Bound, I. ii. 1; I. iv. 12. 
Bout, I. V. 19. 
Bow, I. iv. 5. 
Brain, I. iii. 28. 
Bride, III. v. 146. 
Brief, III. iii. 174. 
Broad, II. iv. 89. 
Broke, I. iii. 37. 
Broken, I. ii. 53. 
Burn daylight, I. iv. 43. 
But, Prol. 11; II. ii. 76. 
Butcher of a silk button, II. iv. 23. 
Butt-shaft, II. iv. 16. 
By and by, II. ii. 151; III. i. 173; 

III. iii. 76. 
By'r lady, I. v. 35. 

Cage, II. iii. 7. 
Candle-holder, I. iv. 38. 
Canker, II. iii. 30. 



207 



208 



WOED INDEX 



Cank'red, I. i. 87. 

Captain of compliments, II. iv. 20. 

Care, IV. i. 45. 

Carries it away, III. i. 76. 

Carry, I. i. 1; IV. v. 117. 

Case, IV. V. 96, 

Catling, IV. v. 129. 

Cause, II. iv. 25. 

Centre, II. i. 2. 

Challenge, III. v. 216. 

Cha,nge eyes. III. v. 31. 

Chapless, IV. i. 83. 

Charge, V. ii. 18. 

Cheveril, II. iv. 85. 

Chinks, I. v. 119. 

Choking, I. 1. 186. 

Chop-logic, III. V. 150. 

Circumstance, II. v. 36; V. iii. 181. 

Civil, Frol. 4; III. ii. 10. 

Closet, IV. ii. 33. 

Coals, I. i. 1. 

Cock-a-hoop, I. v. 83. 

Cockatrice, III. ii. 45. 

Coil, II. V. 66. 

Coldly, III. i. 54. 

Colliers, I. i. 2, 

Combined, II. iii. 60. 

Come up, II. V. 63. 

Comes, I. i. 23. 

Comfortable, V. iii. 148. 

Commend, II. iv, 167. 

Commission, I\'. i. 64. 

Compliment, II. ii. 89. 

Compliments, II. iv. 20. 

Conceal'd, III. iii. 98. 

Conceit, II. vi. 30; IVo iii. 37. 

Conduct, III. i. 127. 

Confessor, II. vi. 21. 

Confidence, II. iv. 121. 

Confounds, II. vi. 13. 

Conjurations, V. iii. 68. 

Conjure, II. i. 6. • 

Consort, III. i. 48. 

Consorted, II. i. 26. 

Constrains, II. iv. 55. 

Content, I. iii. 64; I. v. 67. 

Contract, II. ii. 117. 

Contrary, I. v. 87. 

Convoy, II. iv. 186. 

Cot-quean, IV. iv. 6. 

Counsel, II. ii. 53. 



Counterfeit, II. iv. 46. 

County, I. ii. 67; I. iii. 83. 

Court-cupboard, I. v. 8. 

Courtship, III. iii. 34. 

Cousin, I. V. 32. 

Cover, I. iii. 68, 

Coz, I. i. 175. 

Create, I. i. 169. 

Cross, IV. iii. 5; V. iii. 20. 

Crotchets, IV. v. 117. 

CrovF-keeper, I. iv. 6. 

Crush a cup, I. ii. 84, Ss, 

Crutch, I. i. 68. 

Clubs, I. i. 65. 

Cry a match, II. iv. 72. 

Curfew-bell, IV. iv. 4. 

Cynthia's brow, III. v. 20. 

Dainty, I. v. 21. 

Dared, II. iv. 12. 

Dark, II. ii. 105, 106. 

Date, I. iv. 3; I. iv. 105. 

Dateless, V. iii, 115. 

Dead, III. v, 95. 

Dear, II. ii. 190; IT. iii. 66; V. ii. 

19; V. iii, 32, 
Debt, I. V. 120. 
Deni'd, I. i. 149. 
Deny, I. v. 21. 
Depart, III. i. 55. 
Desperate, III. iv. 12. 
Determine of, III. ii. 49. 
Detestable, V. iii. 45. 
Devotion, I. v. 100. 
Digressing, III. iii, 127. 
Discover, III. i. 145. 
Discovered, II. ii. 106. 
Dislike, II. ii. 61. 
Dismemb'red, III. iii. 134. 
Disparagement, I. v, 72. 
Dispute, III. iii. 63. 
Distance, , II. iv. 21. 
Distemperature, II. iii, 40. 
Distempered, II. iii. 33. 
Distilling, IV. i. 94. 
Distraught, IV. iii. 49. 
Division, III. v. 29. 
Doctrine, I. i. 230. 
Doff, II. ii. 47. 
Dog's name, II. iv. 205. 
Done, I. iv. 39. 



ROMEO AND JULIET 



209 



Doth, Prol. 8. 

Doves, II. V. 7. 

Dowdy, II. iv. 42. 

Down, III. V. 67. 

Drave, I, i. 112. 

Drawer, III. i. 9. 

Drawn, I. i. 58. 

Dream, I. iv. 50. 

Drift, II. iii. 55. 

Drivelling, II. iv. 93. 

Drown'd, I. ii. 94. 

Drums, I. iv. 86. 

Dry, III. V. 59. 

Dry-beat, III. i. 81; IV. v. 123. 

Dump, IV. V. 105. 

Dun, I. iv. 41. 

Dun's the mouse, I. iv. 40. 

Dwell on form, II. ii. 88. 

Earth, I. ii. 15; II. i. 2. 

Earthquake, I. iii. 22. 

Earth-treading, I. ii. 25. 

Elder, I. v. 40. 

Elf-locks, I. iv. 90. 

Ell, II. iv. 86. 

Engrrossing:, V. iii. 115. 

Entrance, I. iv. 8. 

Entreat, IV. i. 40. 

Envious, I. i. 148; III. i. 171; III. 

ii. 38. 
Estate, III. iii. 63. 
Esteem, I. iii. 50. 
Ethiop's ear, I, v. 48. 
Evening mass, lY. i. 38. 
Eyes, II. iii. 68. 
Excuse, III. i. 65. 
Exile, III. iii. 20. 
Expire, I. iv. 106. 
Extreme, II. Prol. 14. 
Extremities, II. Prol. 14. 

Fair, I. iii. 70; I. v. 75; II. Prol. 3. 

Fall out, I. iii. 31. 

Fan. II. iv. 101. 

Fantasticoes, II. iv. 29. 

Farewell, II. ii. 89. 

Fashion-mongers, II. iv. 33. 

Fay, I. V. 128. 

Fear, I. i. 28, 29. 

Fearful, III. iii. 1; III. v. 3. 

Feeling, III. v. 75. 



Fee-simple, III. i. 34. 

Feign, II. iv. 16. 

Fettle, III. V. 154. 

Field-bed, II. i. 30. 

Film, I. iv. 63. 

Fine, I. v. 96. 

Fire, I. v. 30. 

Fires, I. ii. 93. 

Fish, I. ii^. 69. 

Fishified, II. iv. 39. 

Flattering, V. i. 1. 

Fleer, I. v. 59. 

Flies, II. iv. .32. 

Flirt-gills, II. iv. 147. 

Flower'd, II. iv. 62. 

Fond, III. iii. 52; IV. iv. 79. 

Fool, III. i. 139. 

For, II. Prol. 3. / 

Form, II. ii. 88; II. iv. 34. 

Fortune's tender. III. v. 186. 

Foul, I. V. 6. 

Fourteen years, I. ii. 9. 

Frank, II. ii. 131. 

Friend, II. v. 43. 

'Gainst, III. v. 154. 

Gall, I. i. 186. 

Gapes, II. Prol. 2. 

Garish, III. ii. 23. 

Gear, II. iv, 96; V. i. 60. 

Ghostly, II. ii. 189. 

Gipsy, II. iv. 43. 

Give, IV. V. 113. 

Give leave, I. iii. 6; II. v. 25. 

Gleek, IV. v. 112. 

Go thy ways, II. v. 42. 

Goto, I. V. 79; II. iv. 180. 

God-den, I. ii. 57; III. v. 173. 

God forbid, I. iii. 3. 

God save the mark. III. ii. 51. 

God ye good den, III. v. 173. 

God ye good morrow, II. iv. 104. 

Goes to the wall, I. i. 15, 16. 

Good den, II. iv. 105, 106; III. 

i. 40. 
Good meaning, I. iv. 46, 47. 
Good morrow, II. iii. 34; II. iv. 

104. 
Good thou, I. v. 8. 
Good time, I. ii. 45. 
Goodman boy, I. v. 79. 



210 



WORD INDEX 



Goose, II. iv. 80, 89. 

Gore-blood, III. ii. 54. 

Gossip, II. i. 11. ' 

Gossip's, III. V. 175. 

Gown, I. i. 66. 

Grace, I. iii. 39; II. iii. 15; II. iii. 

28; II. iii. 86. 
Grandsire, I. iv. 37; II. iT. 31. 
Grant, I. v. 107. * 

Green, II. ii. S; III. v. 222; IV. 

iii. 42. 
Green-sickness, III. v. 157. 
Grievance, I. i. 149. • 
GyTres, II. ii. ISO. 

Hai, II. iv. 26. 

Hall, I. V. 28. 

Hams, II. iv. 55. 

Hand on heart. III. v. 192. 

Hap, II. ii. 190. 

Happy, III. V. 112. 

Harlotry, IV. ii. 14. 

Have at thee, I. i. 64. 

Heartless, I. i. 58. 

Hearts, II. iii. 68. 

Heavy, I. i. 129; I. iv. 12; 

Helen, II. iv. 43. 

Hero, II. iv. 43. 

High-lone, I. iii. 35. 

Hilding, II. iv. 43; III. v. 169. 

Him, II. i. 4. 

Hinds, I. i. 58. 

His, I. iv. 105; II. vi. 12. 

Homely, II. iii. 55. 

Hoodwink' d, I. iv, 4. 

Holp, I. ii. 48. 

Hopes, I. ii. 24. 

House, II. iv. 24. 

Humorous, II. i. 26. ' 

Humours, II. i. 7. 

Hunt's-up, III. V. 34. 

Ill-divining, III. v. 54. 

Import, V. i. 28, 29. 

In good time, I. ii. 45. 

In happy time, MI. v. 112. 

Inconstant, IV. i. 119. 

Indite, II. iv. 123. 

Inherit, I. ii. 30. 

Injuries, III. i. 68. 

Interest, III. i. 191. 

Is, III. ii. 125; V. iii. 214. 



Jack, III. i. 12; IV. v. 145. 
Jacks, II. iv. 146. 
Jaunce, II. v. 26. 
Jealous, V. iii. 33. 
Jealous-hood, IV. iv. 13. 
Joint-stools, I. V. .7. 
Jove, II. ii. 93. 
Just, III. ii. 76. 
Justly, III. ii. 76. 

Keeps watch, II. iii. 35. 
Kindly, II. iv. 57. 
King Cophetua, II. i. 14. 
Knaves, I. v. 29. 
Knife, II. iv. 194. 

Lahel, IV. i. 57. 

Ladies of esteem, I. iii. 50. 

Lady, III. iii. 98. 

Ladybird, I. iii. 3. 

Lammas-tide, I. iii. 14. 

Laura, II. iv. 40. 

Lay, I. iii. 11. 

Lay knife aboard, II. iv. 197. 

Lazy-pacing, II. ii. 31. 

Leave, I. iii. 6; II. vi. 25. 

Legs, I. iv. 34. 

Lenity, III. i. 126. 

Letter, II. iv. 203. 

Level, III. iii. 103. 

Lies, II. iii. 52. . 

Light, I. i. 129; I. iv, 12; II. ii. 

105, 106. 
Lightning, II. ii. 119, 
Like, I. V. 137. 
Like of, I. iii. 75. 
Live once, I. iii. 41. 
Livery, II. ii. 8. 
Lives, I. iii. 69. 
Loggerhead, IV. iv. 21, 
Longer liver, I. v. 16. 
Long sword, I. i. 67, 
Love, I. i. 161. 

Loves, I. ii. 87; II. iv. 42; V. v. 9. 
Lovers' perjuries, II. ii. 93, 
Loving-jealous, II. ii. 182. 
Lure back, II. ii. 160. 
• Lustier, II. iv. 145. 

Made, I. ii. 13; II. iv. 109, 110; 

V. iii. 280. 
Maid, II. ii. 6. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 



211 



Makes, I. ii. 23. 

Mammet, III. v. 186. 

Man of wax, I. iii. 56. 

Manage, III. i. 146. 

Mandrakes', IV. iii. 47. 

Manes, I. iv. 89. 

Mannerly, I. v. 100. 

Manners, I. v. 4. 

Many, II. iv. 16. 

Mar, II. iv. 109, 110. 

Marchpane, I. v. 9. 

Margent, I. iii. 66. 

Mark, I. iii. 39: III. ii. 51. 

Marred, I. ii. 13. 

Marriage, IV. i. 11. 

Married, I. ii. 13; I. Iii. 63; I. v. 

136. 
Marry, I. i. 29; I. iii. 21; I. iii. 43; 

II. iv. 16. 
Mask, I. V. 35. 
Mass, IV. i. 38. 
Match, II. iv. 72. 
Me, I. iii. 8; III. i. 6. 
Mean, III. iii. 45. 
Meaning, I. iv. 46, 47. 
Measure, I. iv. 12. 
Mend my soul, I. v. 81. 
Merchant, II. iv. 139. 
Merit, I. i. 214. 
Merry, I. ii. 64. 
Mew'd, III. iv. 11. 
Mickle, II. iii. 15. 
Midwife, I. iv. 54. 
Minim rests, II. iv. 22. 
Minion, III. v. 152. 
Minstrel, IV. v. 113. 
Misadventur'd, Prol. 7. 
Misadventure, V. i. 28, 29. 
Mistemper'd, I. i. 79. 
Mistress, I. i. 226; II. iv. 188. 
Modern, III. ii. 118. 
Moe, III. i. 122. 
Mood, III. i. 13. 
Moody, III. i. 14. 
Morrow, I. i. 152; II. ii. 186; II. 

iv. 104. 
Mouse-hunt, IV. iv. 11. 
Move, I. iii. 76; III. iv. 2. 
Much upon, I. iii. 52. 
Muffled, I. i. 163. 
Mutiny, Prol. 3; I. v. 82. 



Natural, II. iv. 94. 

Near ye, I. v. 22. 

Needy, III. ii. 115; III. v. lOG. 

News, II. V. 22. 

Nice, III. i. 157; V. ii. 18. 

Nor no, I. iv. 7. 

Numher, I. ii. 32, 33. 

Nuptial, I. V. 37. 

0, III. iii. 90. 
Of, I. i. 30. 

Of esteem, I. iii. 50. 

Old, III. iii. 94. 

Old Desire, II. Prol. 1. 

On, I. iT. 2. 

Once, I. iii. 41. 

Operation, III. i. 8. 

Osier cage, II. iii. 7. 

Ours, II. iii. 7. 

Out, I. iv. 3. 

Outrage, III. i. 89; V. iii. 216. 

Overwhelming, V. i. 39. 

Owes, II. ii. 46. 

Part, I. i. 106, 107; I. ii. 17; II. 

iii. 25. 
Partisans, I. i. 65. 
Parts, III. iii. 2; III. v. 183. 
Pass, II. iii. 63. 
Passado, II. iv. 26; III. i. 87. 
Passing, I. i. 226, 228. 
Passage, Prol. 9. 
Pastry, IV. iv. 2. 
Pathways, I. i. 164. 
Pay, I. i. 2.30. 
Perdona-mi's, II. iv. 33. 
Perforce, I. v. 91. 
Phaethon, III. ii. 3. 
Phrase, I. iv. 37. 
Phoebus, III. ii. 2. . 
Pilcher, III, i. 83. 
Pilgrim, I. v. 99. 
Pin, II. iv. 15. 
Pink'd, II. iv. 62. 
Pitch, I. iv. 21. 
Plantain, I. ii. 52. 
Plats, I. iv. 89. 
Pois'd, I. ii. 99. 
Portly, I. V. 68. 
Pox, II, iv. 28, 
Presence, I. v. 75; V, iii. 86. 



212 



WOED INDEX 



Present, V. i. 51. 
Prick-song, II. iv. 21. 
Prince of cats, II. iv. 19. 
Princox, I. v. 88. 
Prison, I. ii. 56, 57. 
Procure, to, II. ii. 145. 
Procures, III. v. 68. 
Prodigious, I. v. 142. 
Profaners, I. i. 74. 
Prolixity, I. iv. 3. 
Prologue, I. iv. 7. 
Proof, I. i. 162; I. i. 202. 
Propagate, I. i. 179. 
Properer, II. iv. 200. 
Proportion, II. iv. 21. 
Prorogue, IV. i. 48. 
Prorogued, II. ii. 78. 
Punto reverse, II. iv. 26. 
Purg'd, I. i. 183. 
Puts, I. i. 223. 

Queen Mab, I. iv. 53, 
Quench the fire, I. v. 30. 
Quit, II. iv. 187. 
Quote, I. iv. 31. 

Rat-catcher, III. i. 77. 

Head, II. iii. 88. 

Heason of. III. i. 54. 

Kebeck, IV. v. 132. 

Seceptacle, IV. iii. 39. 

Beckoning, I. ii. 32, 33, 

Keeky, IV. i. 83. 

Heflex, III. V. 20. 

Heligion, I. ii. 92. 

Kememb'red me, I. iii. 8. 

Respective, III. i, 126. 

Best, I. ii. 64; V. iii, 110, 170. 

Revolts, II. iii. 20. 

Riddling, II. iii. 56. 

Roe, II. iv. 38. 

Rood, I, iii. 35' 

Ropery, II. iv. 140. 

Rosemary, II. iv. 202; IV. v. 76. 

Rote, II. iii. 88. 

Rude, II. iii. 28. 

Runaway's eyes, III. ii. 6. 

Rush'd aside, III. iii. 26. 

Rushes, I. iv. 36, 

Rust, V. iii. 170. 



fadness, I. i. ICl, 104. 

Sadly, I. i. 193. 

Said, I. V. 88, 

Saint, II. ii. 55, 

Save the mark, III. ii. 51. 

Save your reverence, I. iv, 42. 

Scales, I. ii. 100, 

Scant, I. ii. 103. 

Scarlet, II. v. 72. 

Scathe, I, v. 86, 

Season, II. iii. 72. 

Semblance, I. v. 76, 

Sententious, II. iv. 207, 

Serv'd in, II. iv. 83. 

Set abroach, I. i. 96. 

Shall, I. i. 12; I. iv. 32, 

Share, I. iii. 71. 

She, I. ii. 14. 

Shield, IV. i. 41. 

Should, I. ii. 74; I. v. 56. 

Show, I. ii. 103, 

Shows, I. V. 50. 

Shrift, I. i. 151; II. iii. 56; II, iv. 

176. 
Shriv'd, II. iv. 178. 
Shut up, I. ii, 56, 57, 
Sick and green, II. ii. 8. 
Siege, I. -i. 204. 
Simple, II. V. 38. 
Simpleness, III. iii. 77. 
Simples, V. i. 40. 
Singleness, II. iv. 68. 
Single-sol'd, II. iv. 67, 
Sir-reverence, I. iv. 42. 
Sit, II. iv. 34. 
Skains-mates, II. iv, 148, 
Slack, IV. 1. 3. 
Slip, II. iv, 50. 
Slop, II. iv. 46. 
Sraatter, II. v. 172. 
So, II. ii. 97; II, ii. 154. 
So ho, II. iv. 124. 
Soar, I. iv. 12. 
Solemnity, I. v. 59. 
Soles, I. iv. 12. 
Soon- speeding, V. i. 60. 
Sore, I. iv. 12. 
Sorrow, III. v. 59. 
Sort, IV. ii. 34. 
Soul, I. iv. 12. 



EOMEO AND JULIET 



213 



Sound, III. ii. 124, 

Soundpost, IV. T. 135. 

Spanish tlades, I. iv. 84. 

Sped, III. 1. 93. 

Speed, V. iii. 121. 

Spheres, II. ii. 117. 

Spinners, I. iv. 59. 

Spite, I. i. 70. 

Spoke, I. iv. 1; IV. i. 28. 

Spurs, II. Iv. 71. 

Stair, II. iv. 184. 

Stakes, I. iv. 16. 

Stand, I. ii. 32, 33. 

Stand on, II. iii. 93. 

Stand to, II. iv. 143. 

Stands, I. iii. 45; III. iii. 166. 

Star-cross'd, Prol. 6. 

Stars, I. ii. 25; V. i. 24. 

Starv'd, I, i. 211. . 

State, III. iii. 166. 

Stay, I. i. 204; II. v. 36; IV. iii. 

57. • 
Steads, II. iii. 54. 
Still, I. i. 163; II. iii. 27; IV. iii. 

29; V. iii. 270. 
Still-waking, I. i. 173. 
Stoccata, III. i. 76. 
Stol'n him, II. i. 4. 
Store, I. i. 208. 
Strain'd, II. iii. 19. 
Strange, II. ii. 101, 102; III. ii. 13. 
Strife, II. ii. 152. 
Strucken, I. i. 224. 
Stumbled, V. iii. 122. 
Stumbling, II. iii. 20. 
Sucking, II. iii. 12. 
Suit, II. ii. 152. 
Sum, II. vi. 34. 
Surcease, IV. i. 97. 
Swashing, I. i. 55. 
Sweetmeats, I. iv. 76. 
Sweet water, V. iii. 1. stage-dir. 
Switch, II. iv. 71. 
Sword, I. i. 67. ' 

Tables, I. v. 29. 

Tackled, II. iv. 184. 

Take me with you. III. v. 142. 

Take the wall, I. i. 13. 

Take truce. III. i. 160. 

Talked on, II. v. 42. 



Tall, II. iv. 30. 

Tartar's bow, I. iv. 5. 

Tassel-gentle, II. ii. 160.^ 

Tears, I. ii. 93. 

Teen, I. iii. 12. 

Temper, III. v. 98. 

Temper'd, III. iii. 115. 

Temp'ring, II. Prol. 14. 

Tender, III. i. 73; III. iv. 12: III. 

V. 186. 
Tetchy, I. iii. 31. 
That, II. iii. 9; II. vi. 25. 
Thee, I. i. 59; I. v. 67. 
Thing, II. ii. 132. 
Thisbe, II. iv. 44. 
Though not, II. ii. 39. 
Thought long, IV. v. 38. 
Thou's, I. iii. 8. 
Thrive, II. ii. 154. 
Time, I. ii. 45; II. iv. 21; III. v. 

112; IV. i. 40. 
Timeless, V. iii. 162. 
Titan, II. iii. 4. 
Tithe-pig, I. iv. 79. 
To-night, I. iv. 50; II. iv. 2. 
Took, I. V. 110. 
Tool, I. i. 23. 
Top-gallant, II. iv. 185. 
Torch, I. iv. 11. 
Towards, I. v. 124. 
Toy, IV. i. 119. 
Trencher, I. v. 2. 

Tried, 1\ . iii. 29. ) 

Truce, III. i. 160. 
Truckle-bed, II. i. 29. 
Truth, V. i. 1. 
Tuners, II. iv. 29. 
Turn up, I. v. 29. 



IJnattainted, I. ii. 89. 
Unbound, I. iii. 67. 
Unbruised, II. iii. 37. 
Uncomfortable, IV. v. 57. 
Uneven, IV. i. 5. 
Unmann'd, III. ii. 12. ^ 
Unstuff'd, II. iii. 37. 
Unthrifty, V. iii. ,136. 
Upon, I. iii. 52. 
Urg'd, I. i. 195. 
Utters, V. i. G7, 



214 



WOED INDEX 



Validity, III. iii. 33. 
Vanish' d, III. iii. 10, 
Versal, II.^^v. 20. 
Vestal, II. ii. 8. 
Vex'd, I. 1. 184. 
View, I. i. 161, 163. 
Virtues, II. iii. 13, 
Visor, I. iv. 30. 

Walk, I. V, 19;. III. i. 77, 

Wall, I. i. 13. 

Wanting of, II. ii. 78. 

Wanton, II, v. 71. 

Wantons, I. iv. 35. 

Wanton's, II. ii, 178, 

Ward, I. V. 42. 

Watch, II. iii. 35. 

Watching, IV. iv, 8, 

Wax, I. iii. 56. 

Weak, II. iv. 166, 

Well, IV. V. 73. 

Well said, I. v. 88. 

Wench, II. v. 45. 

What, I. i. 227; I. iii. 2; I. v. 

II. V. 45. 
What to, III. i. 15, 
Where, Frol. 4, 



Which, I. iv. 16; I. iv. 32; III. iii. 

123; V. iii. 14; V. iii. 250. 
White-upturned, II. ii. 29. 
Who, I. i. 104; I. i. 122; I. iv. 97. 
Wild-goose chase, II. iv, 73, 74. 
Will, I. i. 164; II. iii. 28. 
Winking at, "V. iii. 294, 
Wit, I. i. 201; III. iii. 122; III. v, 

74. 
With, I. 1. 143. 
Withal, I. V. 117, 
With you, II. iv. 76. 
Within, I. iii. 70. 
Without, I. iii. 70. 
Without-hook, I. iv. 7. 
Worm, I. iv. 65. 
Wormwood, I. iii. 25. 
Worser, III. ii. 106, 
Worth, II. vi. 32. 
Wot, III. ii. 135. 
Wrought, III, V. 145, 

Yoke, V, iii. 111. 

Young Affection, II. Prol. 2, 

Your, I. ii, 52, 53, 

'Z«und8, III. 1. 51. 



APPENDIX 

(Adapted, and enlarged, from the Manual for the Study 
of English Classics, by George L. Marsh) 

HELPS TO STUDY 
The Drama 

In what did the drama originate? 

Describe briefly the miracle plays, or ^'mysteries," 
telling where they were performed, by whom, and what, 
in, general, was their subject matter (pp. 17-20). 

What elements were contained in the miracle plays 
that had an influence toward the development of comedy? 

What were moralities ? Interludes ? 

What foreign influences contributed to the develop- 
ment of the Elizabethan drama (pp. 22-23) ? 

Name several of Shakspere 's predecessors in the drama. 
Who was the greatest of them? 

Describe briefly the theater of Shakspere 's day (pp. 
29, 30). The' characteristics of an Elizabethan audience. 
Did Shakspere write his plays for posterity or to please 
an audience of his own time? 

Shakspere 's Career 

Wh^n and where was Shakspere born? 

What can you say as to his education (p. 24) ? His 
oceupations before he went to London? 

What do we know about his early years in London? 

What were his first dramatic efforts (p. 26) ? What 
other literary work, besides the writing of plays, did 
he do? 

215 



216 APPENDIX 

Learn the general characteristics of Shakspere's work 
during each of the four periods into which it is divided, 
and the names of representative plays of each period 
(pp. 31-34). 

Perry Pictures 73-75 have to do with Shakspere and 
his home. 

EoMEO AND Juliet — General Considerations 

What is the probable date of composition of this play 
(pp. 36, 37) ? Its position, chronologically, among Shak- 
spere 's plays? "What are the facts as to editions of it? 

What is the main direct source of the play? The gen- 
eral history of the story (pp. 38, 39) ? What are the 
most noteworthy changes Shakspere made (p. 39) ? 

As in the ease of other plays of Shakspere, find ex- 
amples of the various metrical characteristics described 
on pages 40-43 ; and of the peculiarities of language dis- 
cussed on pages 43-47. 

Pay close attention to the remarks in the Notes (pp. 
176, 179, etc.) as to the main function of each scene in 
the play as a w^hole. Specific details in support of the 
editor's suggestions should be sought, and of course 
criticism is proper if based on evidence from the text. 

The use of prose and verse is, as usual, worth study. 
For example, in the very first scene the servants in their 
serio-comic talk use prose; but as soon as characters of 
higher station appear and the quarrel becomes more se- 
rious, verse is used. Similar changes may be noted else- 
where. 

Various matters of style demand attention: the fre- 
quent use of rime, even alternative rime; of conceits, 
word-play, balance, etc.; the lyrical character of much 
of the play. Specific lyrical passages of special impor- 
tance are the sonnet when Romeo and Juliet meet ; Juliet 's 
evening song (serena) or epithalamium (III, ii) ; and the 
nlha or dawn song at- the beginning of III, iv. 



APPENDIX 217 

How much of an effort seems to be made to give an 
Italian coloring to the play? Point out ways in which 
action, characters, and atmosphere seem appropriate to 
the scene. How has this play been used in relation to 
the contention that Shakspere visited Italy? 

Wh^t is approximately the duration of time of the 
play? The time-scheme may easily be worked out, and 
the movement will be found astonishingly rapid, especially 
in comparison with the source. What is the effect of 
this? 

What do you think of the plot structure? The follow- 
ing brief analysis may be tested: Exciting force, the 
love at first sight of Eomeo and Juliet; rising action, 
culminating in their marriage; turning point and tragic 
f grce, Komeo 's banishment ; a period of suspense when 
the potion acts properly; catastrophe, the death of both 
lovers by their own hands, when each thinks the other 
dead. Thus the main story is that of the ' ' star-cross 'd 
lovers"; the feud of their families is an enveloping or 
background action. The * ' course of true love ' ' is com- 
plicated very slightly by the preliminary love of Eomeo 
for Eosaline; much more by the love of Paris for Juliet. 

The acts of the play have rather exceptional unity. 
They may be examined in detail to determine the sound- 
ness of these titles for them: (1) meeting; (2) marriage; 
(3) separation; (4) efforts for reunion; (5) failure and 
death. 

The structure of single scenes is in a nun^ber of cases 
very skillful; e. g., the two quarrel scenes. These should 
be studied with staging in mind, the grouping of char- 
acters, etc. 

Preparation is very carefully handled in this play. Note 
the following examples and supplement them : hints in the 
prologues to acts I and II; the Prince's threat (p. 55) ; 
Benvolio's suggestion that Eomeo' "examine other beau- 
ties" (p. 60); the remarks of Eomeo and Juliet when 



218 APPENDIX 

they learn eaeh other's identity (pp. 78, 79); Juliet's 
further misgivings in the balcony scene; the introduction 
of Friar Lawrence as interested in herbs and poisons (pp. 
90, 91); the Friar's hope of ending strife between the 
families; Benvolio's first speech in III, i, etc. 

Note how the comic elements of the play are inter- 
woven with the tragic. A striking example is Mercutio's 
persistence in witticisms as he is dying (pp. 110, 111). 
Are the comic parts ever out of harmony? 

Work out the way in which the characters are balanced 
in pairs; e. g., the two lovers, their parents, the confi- 
dantes, the various partisans of the rival families, etc. 

In what way and to what extent do Eomeo and Juliet 
develop in character? Is it reasonable to expect real 
character development in five or six days? How else 
may the changes in the lovers be reasonably explained? 
Is the tragic result of the play in any way due to the 
character of the lovers? 

Do you consider- Eomeo 's love of Eosaline merely fanci- 
ful, or a genuine love? Examine the evidence carefully, 
for commentators have taken both sides of the question. 

Note that the Nurse is in function one of the most 
conventional of stage characters — the confidante — but has 
been made completely individual. How has this been 
done? 

What do you think of the contention that Friar Law^ 
rence is a sort of chorus to express the poet's own* sober 
judgment? Is he not a confidante for Eomeo (to a de- 
gree for both lovers) as the Nurse is for Juliet? 

Do you think the play exhibits the fatal results of im- 
moderate pa&^ion; or is it really a glorification of true 
love? What is actually accomplished even though the 
lovers die? 

Is it a defect that the tragedy is to so great an extent 
a result of mere chance ? Make a careful list of the things 
that result badly through chance alone. 



APPENDIX 219 

What has been the comparative popularity of Borneo 
and Juliet, among Shakspere 's plays, on the stage? How 
do you acc':5unt for it? 

Perry Picture 1117 is Makowsky's Eomeo and Juliet. 

Details of the Play 

What does the Prologue (p. 51) accomplish? What is 
its most significant line (or phrase) ? 

Wherein is the introductory scene particularly effective? 
Points to note are: the remarkable directness with which 
the family feud that causes the whole tragedy is forced 
on the attention; the small amount of formal exposition 
that is needed; the crescendo effect up to the arrival of 
the Prince. 

How is Eomeo introduced (p. 56) ? Note the romantic 
interest at once aroused. 

What is gained for the play by the plans expounded 
in I, ii? 

What is accomplished by the long conversations of the 
Nurse (pp. 66 ff., etc.) ? What important fact as to the 
relation of Juliet to her family and whole environment 
is very soon brought out? 

Has Mercutio's Queen Mab speech (p. 71) anything 
to do with the play? Does it reveal character? On what 
ground may it be defended? 

The staging of the masquerade scene (pp. 75-79, espe- 
cially) Ijiould be worked out, or discussed by those who 
have seen the play well presented. It gains much in ef- 
fectiveness when one realizes ^low the persons on the stage 
are grouped and how the bits of disjointed conversation 
are handled. 

What is the precise form of the first conversation of 
Eomeo and Juliet (pp. 77, 78) ? What other parts of the 
play have similar form? With what difference? 

List the elements that contribute to the effectiveness of 



220 APPENDIX 

the balcony scene (pp. 82 ff.). Do you find it marred 
in any way? 

Why should Friar Lawrence talk ajt once of herbs and 
poisons in II, iii (p. 91) ? What subtle preparation ,is 
involved f 

Why should II, iv and v, be so prolonged with comedy? 
How do you interpret the fact that Romeo — who was so 
love-sick and melancholy at the beginning of the play — 
now takes part in the comedy? 

Examine in detail the way in which the fatal quarrel 
scene (III, i) is handled — stage groupings, climactic ar- 
rangement, etc. What is the effect of having Romeo's 
well meant interference result so badly? 

What do you think of the assertion which has been 
mac^-?, that Shakspere had to "kill off" Mercutio or he 
would have run away with the play? 

Note the balance of scenes two and three in act III; 
one showing Juliet, the other Romeo, in misfortune. 
Which makes the better impression? 

Is the hurrying of the marriage to Paris well accounted 
for? What sort of preparation has there been for the 
harshness of the Capulets toward Juliet? 

Do you see any defense for the comic interlude of the 
servants at the end of IV, v (pp. 155-6) ? For example, 
can it be justified in the same way as the Porter scene in 
Macbeth; or do you find vital differences? 

What elements of effectiveness do you find in the po- 
tion scene (pp. 148-9) ? 

Note the striking effect of contrast at the beginning 
of V, i; the way in which Romeo receives news of Juliet's 
death (p. 158) ; the scene with the Apothecary. 

Why should the play continue after both lovers are 
dead? What is accomplished? Is it necessary or useful? 



APPENDIX 221 

THEME SUBJECTS 

1. Shakspere's life (pp. 24-35). 

2. The drama before Shakspere (pp. 17-23). 

3. The stage of Shakspere's time (with illustration 
of how different parts of this play were presumably 
staged). 

4. A history of the legend of Eomeo and Juliet (pp. 
3S, 39). 

5. The relations of the play and Brooke's poem. 

6. An imaginary scene between Komeo and Eosaline 
(to account for his state of mind at the beginning of the 
play). 

7. An imaginary account of the beginning of the 
feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. 

8. A narrative summary of the feud as it appears 
in the play (with the least possible attention to the love 
story). 

9. A similar summary of the story of Eomeo and 
Juliet (with the least possible attention to other matters, 
such as the feud). 

10. Character sketches of Eomeo, Juliet, Friar Law- 
rence, the Nurse, Mercutio, Capulet, Paris — any other 
character who seems worth treating in detail.- 

11. The plot structure of the play (which may start 
with elucidation or criticism of material suggested on 
p. 217). 

12. The time-scheme of Eomeo and Juliet — a careful 
explanation, from hints within the play, of the time when 
the successive events happen. 

13. Characteristics of Shakspere's early workman- 
ship in this play, involving such topics as the use of rime, 
conceits, and plays on words; artificialities in relation to 
Eomeo 's first love, the noisy mourning of the Capulets, 
etc. 

14. The Tuse of comedy in Borneo and Juliet. All comic 
scones should fee examined in their relation to serious 



222 APPENDIX 

matter; comic characters classified; methods of securing 
c«mic effects noted, etc. 

15. The lyrical elements in the play (most of which 
have been indicated in the preceding ''Helps to Study"). 

16. The Italian element — how definite an impression 
of Italian setting, characters, etc.. Is given? 

17. The role of chance in Borneo and Juliet — a careful 
study of all events in which chance plays an important 
part. 

18. Various problems (most of them suggested in 
*' Helps to Study" above) may be used for argumenta- 
tive discussion ; e. g., the genuineness of Romeo 's love for 
Eosaline, the proper interpretation of Friar Lawrence 's 
character, the lesson of the play (if it has one). 

19. Impressions of a stage presentation of Borneo and 
Juliet; or this may be made more specific — My favorite 
Juliet, My favorite Eomeo, or something of the sort. 

SELECTIONS FOR CLASS READING. 

1. Romeo in love (pp. 56-61). 

2. Queen Mab (pp. 71, 72). 

3. The meeting of Romeo and Juliet (pp. 75, 77-79). 

4. The balcony scene (pp. 82-90 — with perhaps somo 
omissions). 

5. The Nurse and Romeo (pp. 97-101). 

6. The Nurse and Juliet (pp. 102-105). 

7. A street brawl (pp. 107-112). 

8. Juliet receives bad news (pp. 115-19). 

9. Romeo's lament (pp. 120-23). 

10. The Friar's advice (pp. 125-27, 142-44). 

11. The dawn song (pp. 129-31). 

12. The potion scene (pp. 147-49). 

13. Romeo hears of Juliet's death (pp. 157-60). 

14. Romeo at the tomb (pp. 164-66). 

15. Juliet revives (pp. 168, 169). 

16. Reconciliation (pp. 172-74). 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

In the following parallel columns are given the most impor- 
tant dates in the history of English and American literature, 
from the time of Shakspere down to 1900. Special care has 
been taken to include the classics commonly read in high 
schools, so that the historical background of any given classic 
will be apparent from the table: 



AMERICAN 



ENGLISH 

1594-5 Shakspere : Midsummer 

Night's Dream. 
1596 (or earlier,) : Romeo and 
Juliet. 

1598 (or earlier) : TJie Mer- 

chant of Venice. 

1599 Henry V. 
1599-1600 As You Like It. 



1601-1700 



1607 Jamestown founded. 

1608 J. Smith : A True Rela- 

tion. 

1610 Strachey : A True Rep- 
ortory. 



1620 Plymouth Colony founded. 



1601 Julius Ccesar. 

1602 Hamlet; Ticelfth Night 

(acted). 

1603 Queen Elizabeth died. 

1605 Bacon : Advancement of 
Learning. 



1610 Shakspere : Macbeth 

(acted). 

1611 The Tempest (acted). 
"King James" Bible 

printed. 

1612 Bacon : Essays (first edi- 

tion, 1597). 

1614 R a 1 e i J? h : History of 
the World. 

1616 Shakspere died. 

1620 Bacon : Novum Organum. 



223 



224 



APPENDIX 



AMERICAN 



1624 J. Smith : The General 
History of Virginia. 

1630 Massachusetts Bay Col- 
ony founded. 

Bradford : History of 
PUmoth Plantation be- 
gun about this time. 

Winthrop : Journal be- 
gun, ended 1649. 



1635 R. Mother : Journal 

(written). 

1636 Harvard College estab- 

lished. 
1638 New Haven founded. 



1640 The Bay Psalm Bool;. 



1644 Williams : The Bloudy 

Tenent. 



1650 A. Bradstreet : Poems. 



1662 Wigglesworth : The Day 
of Doom. 



1681 C. Mather: Diary begun. 

1682 Philadelphia founded. 

1689 King William's War. 

1692 Salem witchcraft trials. 



ENGLISH 

1623 Shakspere : Plays (first 
/ folio edition). 



1627 Drayton: Ballad o'f A gin- 
court. 



1633 Milton : L'Allegro and II 

Penseroso. 

1634 Milton: Comus (acted). 



1638 Trial of John Hampden. 
Milton : Lycidas (pub- 
lished). 

1642 Theaters closed. 

Browne : Religio Medici. 
1644 Milton : Areopagitica. 

Battle of Marston Moor. 

1648 Herrick : Hesperides. 

1649 Charles I executed. 

1653 Walton : The Compleat 
Angler. 

1660 The monarchy restored. 

Pepys : Diary begun, end- 
ed 1669. 



1666 London fire. 

1667 Milton : Paradise Lost. 

1671 Milton : Paradise Re- 
gained; Sam,son Agon- 
istes. 

1674 Milton died. 
1678 Bunyan: Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress. 

1681 Dryden : Ahsalom and 

Achitophel. 

1682 Dryden : MacFlecknoe. 
1688 The English Revolution. 



1697 Dryden 
Feast. 



Alc.vandcr's 



APPENDIX 



225 



1701-1800 



AMERICAN 



1701 Yale. College established. 
1702-13 Queen Anne's War. 

1702 C. Mather : Magnalia 

Christi Americana. 

1704 Boston News L.etter estab- 
lished. 



1722 Edwards : Diary begun. 



1732 Washington born. 

1733 Franklin: Poor Richard's 

Almanac (begun). 



1741 



Edwards 
Hands 
God. 



Sinners in the 
of an Angry 



175o Braddock's defeat. 

1756 Woolman : Journal (be- 
liun). 

17.-'>S Frnnklin: The Way to 
W(alT]i in ]'oor Rich 
a: (I'.s AliiKinac. 



ENGLISH 

1700 Dry den : Fables ("Pala- 
mon and Arcite," etc.). 

1702 Queen Anne ascended 
throne. 

1704 Swift : Tale of a Tuh. 



1709 

1711 

1712 

1714 
>171o 

1719 
1722 

1726 

1728 
1732 



The 



The 



Steele and Addison 
Tatler begun. 

Steele and Addison: 
Spectator begun. 

Pope : The Rape of the 
Lock. 

Queen Anne died. 

Pope : Translation of the 
Iliad (Books I-IV). 

Defoe : RoMnson Crusoe. 

Defoe : Journal of the 
Plague Year. 

Swift : Gulliver's Travels. 
Thomson : Winter. 

Pope : Dunciad. 

Pope : Essay on Man. 



1740 Richardson : Pamela. 



1742 Fielding : Joseph An- 
drews. 
1744 Death of Pope. 

1747 Gray : Ode on Eton Col- 

lege. 

1748 Richardson: Clarissa 

Harlowe. 

1749 Fielding : Tom Jones. 

1750 Johnson: The Rambler 

(begun). 

1751 Gray : Elegy Written in 

a Country Churchyard. 

1755 Johnson : English Dic- 
tionary. 



226 



APPENDIX 



AMERICAN 



1765 Godfrey : Juvenile Poems 
(with The Prince of 
Parthia, the first Amer- 
ican drama). 

The Stamp Act. * 



1-771 Franklin : AutoMography , 
first part, written. 

1773 P. Wheatley : Poems. 

1775 Trumbull : M'Fingal. 
Henry : Speech in the 

Virginia Convention. 

1776 The Declaration of Inde- 

pendence. 
Paine : Common Sense. 



1783 The Treaty of Paris. 
1785 Dwight : The Conquest 
of Canaan. 

178G Freneau : Poems. 

1789 Franklin : Autobiography, 
second part, written. 



1796 Washington : Farewell 
Address. 

1798 P.row^n: Wieland. 

J. Hopkinson : Hail 
Coliimhia. 



ENGLISH 

1759 Sterne : Tristram Shandif] 

(begun). 
Johnson : Rasselas. 

1760 King George III on 

throne. 
1762 Macpherson : The Poems 
of Ossian. 

1764 Walpole : The Castle of 

Otranto. 

Goldsmith : The Traveler. 

1765 Percy : Reliques of An- 

cient Poetry. 



1766 Goldsmith : Vicar of 
Wakefield. 

1770 Goldsmith : Deserted Vil- 

lage. 

1771 Encyclopedia Britannica, 

first edition. 
1773 Goldsmith : She Stoops 
to Conquer (acted). 

1775 Burke : Speech on Con- 

ciliation. 

Sheridan : The Rivals. 

1776 Gibbon : Decline and Fall 

of Roman Empire. 

1779 Johnson: Lives of the 
Poets. 

1783 Crabbe : The Village. 

1785 Cow^er : The Task. 

1786 Burns : Poems. 

1789 Blake : Songs of Inno- 
cence. 

1791 Boswell : Ldfe of Dr. 
Johnson. 



1798 Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge : Lyrical Ballads 
("The Ancient Mari- 
ner," etc.). 



1801-1900 



1803 The Louisiana Purchase. 



1805 Scott: Lay of the Last 

Minstrel. 
1S08 Scott: Marmion. 



APPENDIX 



227 



AMERICAN 



1809 Irving : Knickerbocker' a 
History of New York. 



1812-14 War with England. 



1814 Key : The Stan-Spangled 

Banner. 

1815 Freneau : Poems. 



1817 Bryant : Thanatopsis, 



1819 Drake : The American 

Flag. 

1820 Irving : The Sketch Book. 
^ The Missouri Compromise. 



1821 Cooper : The Spy. 
Bryant : Poems. 

1822 Irving : Bracehridge Hall. 

1823 Payne : Home, Sweet 

Home. 
Cooper : The Pilot. 

1824 Irving : Tales of a Trav- 

eler. 

1825 Webster : The Bunker 

Hill Monument, 

1826 Cooper : TJie Last of the 

Mohicans. 

1827 P o e : Tamerlane and 

Other Poems. 



1831 Poe : Poems. 

1832 Irving : The Alhamhra. 
S. F. Smith : America. 

1833 Poe : MS. Found in a 

Bottle. 



1809 

1810 

1811 

1812 

1813 
1814 



1815 
1816 



.1817 

1818 
1819 

1820 
1821 

1823 

1824 
1825 

1827 

1828 
1830 

1832 



ENGLISH 

Byron : English Bards 
and Scotch Reviewers. 

Scott : Tlie Lady of the 
Lake. 

J. Austen : Sense and 
SensiMUty. 

Byron : Childe Harold, 
I, II. 

Southey : Life of Nelson. 

Scott : Waverley. 

Wordsworth : The Excur- 
sion. 

The Battle of Waterloo. 

Byron : The Prisoner of 
Ghillon; Childe Harold, 
III. 

Coleridge : Christatel. 

Keats : Poems (first col- 
lection). 

Byron : Childe Harold, 

IV. 
Scott : Ivanhoe. 



Keats : Poems. 

Shelley : Prometheus Urt,- 

hound. 

Shelley : Adonais. 
De Quincey : Confessions 
of an Opium Eater. 

Scott : Quentin Durward. 
Lamb : Essays of Elia. 

Landor : Imaginary Con- 
versations. 

Macaulay : Essay on Mil- 
ton. 



C. Tennyson : 
hy Two Broth- 



A. and 

Poems 

ers. 
Carlyle : Essay on Burns. 
Tennyson : Poem^ Chiefly 

Lyrical. 



Death of Scott; The Re- 
form Bill. 
1833 Carlyle : Sartor Besartus. 
Tennyson : Poems. 
Browning : Pauline. 



228 



APPENDIX 



AMERICAN 

1835 Drake : The Culprit Fay, 

etc. 

1836 Holmes : Poems. 
Emerson : Nature. 

1837 Emerson : The American 

Scholar. 

Hawthorne : Twice^Told 

Tales, first series. 
Whittier : Poems. 
1839 Poe : Tales of the Grotes- 
que and Arabesque. 

Longfellow : Voices of the 
Night. 

1840. Dana : Two Years Before 
the Mast. 

1841 Emerson : Essays, first 

series. 

Longfellow : Ballads and 
Other Poems. 

1842 Hawthorne : Twice-Told 

Tales, second series. 



1843 Poe: The Gold-Bug. 

Prescott : Conquest of 
Mexico. 



1844 Emerson : Essays, second 

series. 

Lowell : Poems. 

1845 Poe : The Raven and 

Other Poems. 

1846 Hawthorne : Mosses from 

an Old Manse. 

1846-48 War with Mexico. 

1847 Emerson : Poems. 
Longfellow : Evangeline. 
Parkman : The Oregon 

Trail. 

1848 Lowell : Vision of Sir 

Launfal. 

1849 Irving ; Oliver Goldsmith. 



1850 Emerson : Representative 
Men, 

Hawthorne : The Scarlet 
Letter. 



ENGLISH 

1835 Browning : Paracelsus. 

1836 Dickens : Pickwick Pa- 

pers. 

1837 Victoria became Queen. 
De Quincey : Revolt of 

the Tartars. 

C a r 1 y 1 e : The French 
Revolution. 



1840 Macaulay : Essay on 

Clive. 

1841 Browning: Pippa Parses. 
Macaulay : Essay on War- 
ren Hastings. 

1842 Macaulay : Lays of An- 

cient Rome. 

Browning : Dramatic 
Lyrics. 

1843 Dickens : A Christmas 

Carol. 

Macaulay : Essay on Ad- 
dison. 

Ruskin : Modern Painters, 
Vol. I. 

1844 E. B. Browning : Poems. 



1845 Browning : Dramatic Ro- 

mances and Lyrics. 

1846 Dickens : The Cricket on 
\ the Hearth. 

1847 De Quincey : Joan of Arc. 
Tennyson : The Princess. 
Thackeray : Vanity Fair 
C. Bronte : Jane Eyre. 

1848 Macaulay : History of 

England, I, II. 

1849 De Quincey : The English 

Mail Coach. 

M. Arnold : The Strayed 
Reveller, etc. 

1850 Tennyson : In Memoriam. 
Dickens : David Copper- 
field. 



APPENDIX 



229 



AMERICAN 

1851 Hawthorne : The House 

of the Seven Oahles. 
Parkman : Tlie Conspir- 
acy of Pontiac. 

1852 Mrs. Stowe : Uncle Tom's 

Cabin. 



1854 Thoreau : Walden. 

1855 Longfellow : Hiawatha. 
Whitman : Leaves of 

Crass. 

1856 Motley. : Rise of the Dutch 

Republic. 
Curtis : Prue andt I. 



1858 Longfellow : Courtship of 
Miles Standish. 

Holmes : Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table. 



1861-65 The Civil War. 



1862-66 Lowell : Biglow Pa- 
pers, II, 

1863 Longfellow : Tales of a 
Wayside Inn. 



1865 Whitman : Drum Taps. 

1866 Whittier ; Snow-Bound. 



ENGLISH , 

1851 Thackeray : Lectures on 
English Humorists. 

G. Meredith : Poems. 



1852 Thackeray : 
mond. 



Henry Es- 



1853 M. Arnold: Poems 
("Sohrab and Rustum," 
etc.). 
Mrs. Gaskell : Granford. 



1855 



1856 



1857 



1859 



R. Browning 
Women. 



1860 



1861 



1862 



1863 



1864 



1865 



1866 



Men and 



Tennyson : 
Macaulay : 
Johnson and Goldsmith. 



Maud. 
Essays on 



Mrs. Browning : 

Leigh. 
Hughes : Tom 

School Dfkys. 



Aurora 



Brown's 



Tennyson 
King. 

Dickens : 

Cities. 

G. Eliot: 

Meredith : 



Idylls of the 
A Tale of Two 



Adam Bede. 
Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel. 
Darwin : The Origin of 
Species. 

G. Eliot: The Mill on 
the Floss. 

G. Eliot : Silas Marner. 
Reade : The Cloister and 
the Hearth. 

Palgrave : The Golden 
Treasury. 

Meredith : Modern Love, 
etc. 

G. Eliot : Romola. 

Browning : Dramatis Per- 
sonw. 

Swinburne : Atalanta in 
Calydon. 

R u s k i n : Sesame and 

Lilies. 
Ruskin : A Crown of Wild 

Olive. 



230 



APPENDIX 



1868 



1870 
1871 

1873 

1876 
1877 

1879 

1881 



1886 
1887 

1888 

1890 
1891 



AMERICAN 

Hale : The Man Without 
a Country, etc. 



Bret Harte : The Luck 
of Roaring Camp, etc. 

Howells : Their Wedding 
Journey. 



Aldrich : Marjorie Daw, 
etc. 

Mark Twain : Tom Saw- 
yer. 

Lanier : Poems. 



Cable : Old Creole Days. 
Stockton : Rudder Orange. 



Whittier : 
Missive, 



The King's 



H. Jackson : Sonnets and 

Lyrics. 
M. E. Wilkins : A Humtle 

Romance, etc. 

Whitman: 'November 
Boughs. 



E. Dickinson : P o em s, 

first series. 
Whitman : Goodbye, My 

Fancy. 



1898 War with Spain. 



ENGLISH 

1868 Browning : The Ring and 

the Book. 

1868-70 Morris : The Earthly 
Paradise. 

1869 Tennyson, The Hoi 

Grail, etc. 

1870 D. G. Rossetti : Poems. 

1871 Swinburne : Songs Before 

Sunrise. 

1872 Tennyson: Gareth and 

Lynette, etc. 

1873 Arnold : Literature an< 

Dogma. 
1876 Morris : Sigurd the Vol- 
sung. 

1878 Stevenson: - An Inlan 

Voyage. 

1879 Stevenson : Travels with 

a Donkey. 
Meredith : The Egoist. 

1881 D. G. Rossetti: Ballads 

and Sonnets. 

1882 Stevenson : New Arahiaii 

Nights. ^ 

1883 Stevenson : Treasure 7s; 

loiid. 

1886 Stevenson : Kidnapped. 

1887 Stevenson : The Mrrri 

Men ("Markheim,' 
etc.). 

1888 Kipling: Plain TaUi 

from the Hills. 
. Ba r ri e: Auld L/^h^ 
Idylls. 

1889 Browning : Asolando 



1891 Kipling: Life's Ha 

cap. 

1892 Tennyson died. 

1893 Conington : Translai. 

of Aeneid published, 

Barrie : Two of Them 
1901 Queen Victoria died. 







fYbmjcU' 



(jV 



.J 



:r 



'm/...J^ 



(..-&1-V (3l^>' ' 



■^U^^-j^^ 



i-^t 











